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Part of
Acquiring Sociolinguistic Variation
Edited by Gunther De Vogelaer and Matthias Katerbow
[Studies in Language Variation 20] 2017
► pp. 91–116

Chapter 4
Child acquisition of sociolinguistic variation

Adults, children and (regional) standard Dutch two-verb clusters in one community

| Meertens Institute/Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences | Maastricht University

The main questions of this paper are whether children acquire adults’ variable V1-V2/V2-V1 word order in the perfective two-verb cluster simultaneously with a rigid V1-V2 word order in the modal two-verb cluster from start of the acquisition process. The experimental results show that children acquire variable word orders following rigid ones confirming Labov’s (1989) expectation that children have to acquire grammatical properties before acquiring stylistic and sociolinguistic constraints. It is, however, not possible to disentangle whether the struggle with the variable word orders in the perfective cluster is due to grammatical reasons only or in combination with the fact that this type of variation reveals no significant social stratification among the adults.

Keywords: acquisition of variation, regional varieties, adult variation, two-verb clusters, modals vs infinitives, social variation, stylistic variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Heerlen Dutch spontaneous adults’ speech: Word order variation in two-verb clusters
    • 2.1Variation in the two-verb clusters in Heerlen
    • 2.2The modal/aspectual cluster
  • 3.Child language acquisition of two types of two-verb clusters
    • 3.1Expectations
    • 3.2Subjects and methodology (taken from Zuckerman 2001)
    • 3.3Results of the elicitation task: Perfective and modal cluster
    • 3.4Comparison with the adults’ word order patterns
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.20.04cor
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