Publications
Publication details [#48267]
Westergaard, Marit R. 2008. Verb movement and subject placement in the acquisition of word order: Pragmatics or structural economy? In Larrañaga, María Pilar, Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes and John Clibbens, eds. First Language Acquisition of Morphology and Syntax. Perspectives across languages and learners. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 45). John Benjamins.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
This chapter reports on a study investigating three children acquiring a dialect of Norwegian (Tromsø). It is shown that, although verb-second (V2) word order is attested early in non-subject-initial declaratives and questions, the children produce non-target-consistent word order in these constructions at an early stage, failing to move pronominal subjects past negation or an adverb. This is analyzed within a split-CP model which also assumes the existence of two subject positions in the IP domain, a high one for informationally given subjects and a lower one for subjects conveying new information. A pragmatic account of the child data is considered, but rejected in favour of an economy-based analysis which includes factors such as input frequency and complexity.