CHILDREN’S INTERPRETATION OF NULL OBJECTS UNDER THE SCOPE OF NEGATION ∗ Ana T. Pérez-Leroux, Mihaela Pirvulescu, Yves Roberge University of Toronto 1. Introduction It is a well-known fact that in some Romance languages young children tend to omit direct objects in their spontaneous and elicited production (Jakubowicz et al. 1997, Schaeffer 1997 Müller et al. 1996). Recent research has pointed out that object omission also appear in the elicited production of English children, and has offered an explanation for it based on a null object analysis (Pérez- Leroux, Pirvulescu and Roberge, 2008). Following this approach, it is legitimate to examine the properties of the null element used by English-speaking children in the place of the overt object. Given the availability of implicit null objects in the target grammar, we investigate children’s interpretation of implicit objects to test whether children go through a developmental stage where they allow these null objects to have anaphoric properties. If they do, then it can be hypothesized that this is what corresponds to the English null object stage. We report on a study designed to test this. 2. Background 2.1 Implicit objects It is generally recognized that most if not all transitive verbs can alternate, and their intransitive use involves an implicit object that is prototypical or generic , and that does not appear to bear a referential index as in (1). (1) She ate ø early last night. (= ‘a meal’, ≠ ‘fish’) Constructions with implicit objects such as those in (1) and (2) play a crucial role in both adult and child grammars. (2) a. Would you like to draw ø? b. He is always kicking ø. Indeed, in some circumstances the implicit object can acquire a pragmatically determined reference. In the dialogue in (3), it can be understood ∗ We would like to thank the audience at the CLA for comments on earlier presentations of this work. Funding for this research was provided in part by a SSHRC grant (410-05- 0239). Actes du congrès annuel de l’Association canadienne de linguistique 2008. Proceedings of the 2008 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. © 2008 Ana T. Pérez-Leroux, Mihaela Pirvulescu and Yves Roberge