Il clitico: C'è ma non si vede

This paper re-examines data from Italian children that Antinucci and Miller (1976) used to demonstrate a stage of obligatory object agreement — a stage representing a significant failure of correspondence between children's developing grammars and the target adult grammar. We interpret the relevant utterances as consistent with the target grammar, and argue that this is a more plausible construal. We also present an elicited production study which corroborates our interpretation. We replicate the kind of data Antinucci and Miller report and in gaps in their corpus. Our interpretation of the data thus crucially undermines the positions of both Antinucci and Miller (1976) and Borer and Wexler (1992). They use the object agreement to support theoretical claims violating the hypothesis that developing grammars obey the constraints of Universal Grammar throughout.