Verb Movement and Subject Placement in the Acquisition of Word Order: Pragmatics or Structural Economy

• Main Author: Marit R. Westergaard
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: John Benjamins 2008
• Subjects: Tromsø
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.296.593; http://www.hum.uit.no/a/westergaard/PUBLICATIONS/WES-LALD06.pdf

This paper 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 nontarget-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 is rejected in favor of an economy-based analysis which includes factors such as input frequency and complexity. 1.