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Toivotamme sinulle oikein hyvää syntymäpäivää!(We wish you a very happy birthday)" "Una vita senza ricerca non è degna per l'uomo di essere vissuta."(Socrate)

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In this introduction to the Special Collection of the same title, we start out by discussing some key issues addressed by recent research on micro-variation in subject realization and interpretation in anaphoric contexts (Section 1). This includes the status of some subject anaphoric devices in null vs. non-null subject languages, the possibility of micro-variation among null subject languages, and the way in which L2 speakers, elderly speakers and children deal with the task at stake and the factors that may influence this process. Then, we briefly summarize the seven contributions to this collection (Section 2) and relate the findings of each contribution to one another as well as to previous research (Section 3). As a whole, the studies in this collection not only shed light on many of the above mentioned issues, but they also raise novel research questions that open new perspectives of investigation into the choice and interpretation of subject referring expressions.

This work reports on accuracy in grammatical gender marking by Italian adults learning German in a formal environment. It aims at investigating whether adult speakers of a [+gender] language who are acquiring a [+gender] L2 language can master a complex gender agreement system given the crucial role played either by other morphosyntactic features in the L2 nominal inflection. Moreover, it explores the role that L2 input (formal instruction; access to the L2 outside classroom activities) may (not) have in this particular domain of language acquisition. Findings indicate that L1 transfer – the fact that [gender] is morphologically realized in both languages although the Italian system is not congruent to the German one – and formal instruction do not play a crucial role in the population investigated for this study. Overall, results show that acquiring lexical gender seems to be possible from early on, whereas mastering more complex agreement configurations where multiple morphosyntactic factors interact on gender marking on nominal elements is problematic even if the category gender is present in the L1.