The Pronoun Interpretation Problem in romance complex predicates

•I provide a derivational account for Condition B effects and obviations in complex predicates.•I report the results of an act-out task testing Italian children's comprehension of clitics.•Faire-Par constructions trigger interpretation problems at similar rates as ECM constructions.

This article argues that the Pronoun Interpretation Problem in child Romance is limited to syntactic constructions in which clitics are not interpreted as bound variables. Reporting experimental data from an Act Out task administered to Italian children aged 3–6, it is shown that not only Exceptional Case Marking but also causative Faire Par constructions trigger PIP. Based on the syntactic properties of the embedded vPs in these two constructions, I argue that coreference is an option for clitic pronouns in these complex predicates. I propose that the cross-linguistic distribution of the phenomenon in light of these findings supports a unitary pragmatic account of the PIP as evidence for the modularity of binding and coreference. The account defended in this paper holds that children's early difficulty with local coreference resides in the syntax/pragmatic interface, involving mastery of a scalar opposition between pronouns and reflexives which interfaces with the syntactic knowledge of the local domain.