Identifying subjects and their referents in L2 Italian

In what follows we will argue that the difficulty experienced by L2ers whose L1 is English in the mastering of subjects in Italian may lie precisely in the fact that Italian and English differ in the way in which discourse referents are referred to, restricting our attention to the cases in which they are sentential subjects. Specifically, we will examine the consequences that the either positive or negative setting of the so-called ‘Null subject parameter’ (Taraldsen, 1980; Rizzi, 1982) may have for the problem insightfully uncovered by Jodi Sandford