This paper explores the syntactic status of che and (il) qual(e) relativizers, i.e. what are standardly referred to as relative complementizers and relative pronouns, in Old and Modern Italian and Italian varieties and proposes a unified analysis for both types of items. It takes into account the ongoing debate regarding the categorial status of relativizers (Kayne 1975, 2008, 2010; Lehmann 1984; Manzini & Savoia 2003, 2011, among many others) and aims at showing that what we call complementizers are not C0 heads, as commonly assumed. Instead, we propose that both relative “complementizers” and “pronouns” have the same categorial status, i.e. they are wh-items and are part of the relative clause-internal head.

There is consensus that languages possess several grammatical variants satisfying the same conversational function. Nevertheless, it is a matter of debate which principles guide the adult speaker’s choice and the child’s acquisition order of these variants. Various proposals have suggested that frequency shapes adult language use and language acquisition. Taking the domain of nominal modification as its testing ground, this paper explores in two studies the role that frequency of structures plays for adults’ and children’s structural choices in German. In Study 1, 133 three- to six-year-old children and 21 adults were tested with an elicited production task prompting participants to identify an agent or a patient referent among a set of alternatives. Study 2 analyzed a corpus of child-directed speech to examine the frequency of passive relative clauses, which children, similar to adults, produced very often in Study 1. Importantly, passive relatives were found to be infrequent in the child input. These two results show that the high production rate of rare structures, such as passive relatives, is difficult to account for with frequency. We claim that the relation between frequency in natural speech and use of a given variant in a specific context is indirect: speakers may opt for the less grammatically complex computation rather than for the variant most frequently used in spontaneous speech.

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This chapter investigates linguistic cycles in order to shed light on the general principles of language change, in the light of certain recent developments in syntactic theory, in particular Kayne’s (2016) proposal that all heads are necessarily silent. If this approach is on the right track, it would have major consequences for economy-based theories of language change that make heavy use of spec-to-head reanalyses. Instead of a spec-to-head reanalysis, we propose that cycles can be accounted for in terms of a change in the silent nominals that an item can be paired with. The testing ground of our claim is provided by the history of Italian relativizers.

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