Transitivity Requirement revisited: Evidence from first language acquisition

The paper investigates null objects in early child grammar in light of the Transi-
tivity Requirement approach (Cummins & Roberge 2005), which states that transi-
tivity is not dependent on the lexical features of the verb but is a universal gram-
matical property. I review naturalistic and experimental child data from sixteen
typologically different languages (including five Slavic representatives) and show
that the predictions of the Transitivity Requirement approach are not borne out.
Instead, the results suggest that early object omissions reflect the presence of (op-
tional) object drop in the target grammar. Children seem to omit objects only if
the target grammar allows for this option, as it is the case, for example, in Russian,
Ukrainian and Polish.