ACQUIRING V˚-TO-I ˚ MOVEMENT IN THE ABSENCE OF MORPHOLOGICAL CUES

• Main Author: Kristine Bentzen
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Tromsø
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.556.2790; http://www.hum.uit.no/arrangementer/19-SCL/sammendrag/bentzen.pdf

Norwegian and the other Mainland Scandinavian languages are V2 languages, and it is generally assumed that whereas the finite verb moves to C ˚ in main clauses, it remains in V ˚ in embedded clauses. Icelandic, on the other hand, has V˚-to-I ˚ movement in embedded clauses, and this has been linked to the fact that Icelandic has richer inflectional morphology on the verb than the Mainland Scandinavian languages (cf. Vikner, 1995, 1997). However, data from certain dialects of Norwegian (Tromsø) and Swedish (Kronoby) (presented by among others Iversen, 1918 and Platzack and Holmberg, 1989) indicate that these dialects optionally may have independent V˚-to-I˚ movement in embedded clauses, even though they do not have any verbal agreement morphology: (1) Vi va ’ bare tre støkka, før det at han Nilsen kom ikkje(Iversen 1918:83-84) we were only three pieces, for that that he Nilsen came not ‘We were only three (people), because Nilsen didn’t come’ It has been suggested that there is a correlation between inflectional morphology and verb movement to an inflectional head. Such a correlation has also been attested in first language acquisition. Although children go through stages where they only optionally mark inflection on the verb, they crucially seem to inflect the verb when it has moved out of the VP (see Guasti and Rizzi