Possessive alternates (prenominal and postnominal) have mirrored

properties in Italian and Norwegian when taking into consideration frequency,

derivation, and markedness; i.e., the variant that is base-generated in one language

is considered the derived one in the other language. Thus, in both languages there is

a variant used for unmarked contexts (i.e., topic) and for marked contexts (i.e.,

contrast). Previous studies have shown that Italian children acquire the use of the

variants with ease, whereas Norwegian children were found to overuse the marked

variant, even in unmarked contexts. Here, we reanalyse the co-occurrences of the

possessive and the noun in the monolingual corpora for the two languages available

on CHILDES, by focusing more attentively on the contextual use of the variants, to

reveal whether the same principles underly the acquisition process. Our findings

contradict the previous claims on the acquisition of Italian but are in line with the

previous findings for Norwegian. Both groups of children overuse the marked but

base-generated variant, indicating the relevance of syntactic economy in language

acquisition.

Keywords Possessives · Economy · Italian · Norwegian · Variation in the input