This article explores a defining property of implicit null object constructions, and how this property emerges during the L1 acquisition process. Implicit objects are non-referential and characterized by a strong semantic association between a null N in object position and the contents of the verb root. By means of an elicited production study, we examine children’s sensitivity to this association in terms of the typicality of implicit direct objects and of their use in a potentially contrastive context. Participants were 73 English-speaking children (between the ages of 2;09 and 5;08) and 20 adult controls. Our results show that children make a distinction between implicit objects with typical and atypical objects—even in scenarios where a previous use introduces a potential contrast—but at rates that differ from those of adults. This suggests an incomplete knowledge of the target properties of null objects and indicates that children use a referential null N until later in development, when the selectional link between V and the null object becomes entrenched and hyponymy with the verb root becomes the sole source of recoverability. We draw implications about the co-development of verb meaning and the null object construction.

This article argues that the realization of agreement in subjunctive andimperative verbs is a consequence of the syntactic status of Tense in these twomoods. Crucially, certain agreement paradigms across Romance languages show verya close resemblance: the subjunctive and imperative paradigms are identical, inmost cases, to the indicative paradigms. Systematically, moods such as thesubjunctive and the imperative do not show specific tense affixes or specifictense-induced allomorphy on their agreement affixes. The proposal is illustratedwith Romanian verbal agreement, which is analyzed within the DistributedMorphology framework. The analysis shows that tense information is not used insubjunctive and imperative agreement morphology, unless it is exactly the sameinformation as in another paradigm — the present indicative. It isproposed that at the syntactic level, Tense is unspecified in the subjunctiveand absent in the imperative, and that the realization of agreement affixes is aconsequence of this syntactic representation.

This article assesses the impact of bilingualism on the acquisition of pronominal direct objects in French and English (clitics in French and strong pronouns in English). We show that, in comparison to monolingual children, bilingual children omit more pronominal objects for a longer period in both languages. At the same time, the development in each language spoken by the bilinguals follows the developmental asymmetry found in the language of their monolingual counterparts: there are more omissions in French than in English. It is also shown that language dominance affects the rate of omissions as there are fewer omissions in the language in which children receive more exposure, i.e. the dominant language. We analyze these results as reflecting a bilingual effect based on the retention of a default null object representation. This in turn is supported by reduced overall input for bilingual children and by language-internal input ambiguity.