ABSTRACT
Between the ages of 2 and 3, children begin to use multiclausal sentences in which the syntactic-semantic relation between the clauses is expressed by an explicit complementizer. This phase, which is marked by developmental steps, immediately follows the so-called successive sentence stage (Cipriani, Chilosi, Bottari, & Pfanner, 1993). Successive sentences are sentences that are syntactically unrelated, but semantically (or pragmatically) connected, as shown in (1):
casca. poi male
‘falls, after pain’ (from Cipriani et al., 1993)
