Embedded V To C In Child Grammar The Acquisition Of Verb Placement In Swiss German

How children acquire competence in verb placement in languages in which verb placement in matrix clauses does not coincide with that in embedded clauses is not well understood. Verb-Second languages like German and Dutch display the verb-final pattern in embedded clauses, which can be confusing for a developing child. This book addresses this problem in the context of Swiss German, itself a Germanic dialect. Numerous examples are given of natural language produced by two children who were consistently followed between the ages of 4 and 6. Unexpectedly, since previous literature has suggested that children master verb placement very early in their linguistic development, these children move the verb in any type of embedded clause, leading to many verb-placement errors. After introducing the problem and describing the data in detail, a technical analysis is developed in terms of a minimally split-CP, which is rather successful in accounting for these data. The book should interest advanced students and researchers in both language acquisition and syntax.

This volume investigates the linguistic development of children with regard to their knowledge of the verb and its grammar. The selection of papers brings to researchers and in particular psycholinguists empirical evidence from a wide variety of languages from Hebrew, through English to Estonian. The authors interpret their findings with a focus on cross-linguistic similarities and differences, without subscribing to either a UG-based or usage-based approach.

The topic of variation in language has received considerable attention in the field of general linguistics in recent years. This includes research on linguistic micro-variation that is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. However, relatively little work has been done on how this variation is acquired. This book focuses on how different types of variation are expressed in the input and how this is acquired by young children. The collection of papers includes studies of the acquisition of variation in a number of different languages, including English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Swiss German, Ukrainian, and American Sign Language. Different kinds of linguistic variation are considered, ranging from pure word order variation to optionally doubly filled COMPs and the resolution of scopal ambiguities. In addition, papers in the volume deal with the extreme case of variation found in bilingual acquisition.

Dummy auxiliaries are seemingly superfluous words that appear in learner varieties across languages. This volume is an up-to-date overview of research on dummy auxiliaries with contributions covering English, Dutch, German, French, Cypriot-Greek, first and second language acquisition, and specific language impairment as well as dialectal variation.

Within a new model of language acquisition, this book discusses verb second (V2) word order in situations where there is variation in the input. While traditional generative accounts consider V2 to be a parameter, this study shows that, in many languages, this word order is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. Thus, within a split-CP model of clause structure, a number of micro-cues are formulated, taking into account the specific context for V2 vs. non-V2 (clause type, subcategory of the elements involved, etc.). The micro-cues are produced in children’s I-language grammars on exposure to the relevant input. Focusing on a dialect of Norwegian, the book shows that children generally produce target-consistent V2 and non-V2 from early on, indicating that they are sensitive to the micro-cues. This includes contexts where word order is dependent on information structure. The children’s occasional non-target-consistent behavior is accounted for by economy principles.

Henk van Riemsdijk has long been known as one of Europe’s most important linguists. His seminal ideas have been influential in developing generative grammar in Europe and beyond. As the initiator, co-founder, and chair of the GLOW society, he made the society the leading platform of European generative linguistics. He has also been editor of the series Studies in Generative Grammar since its foundation. As a teacher and supervisor, he has inspired generations of students. On the occasion of his relocation from the Netherlands to Italy, his friends, students and colleagues celebrate his work with this collection of essays on numerous topics of current theoretical interest.

This book investigates the role that ambiguous evidence can play in the acquisition of syntax. To illustrate this, the book introduces a probabilistic learning model for syntactic parameters that learns a grammar of best fit to the learner’s evidence. The model is then applied to a range of cross-linguistic case studies – in Swiss German, Korean, and English – involving child errors, grammatical variability, and implicit negative evidence. Building on earlier work on language modeling, this book is unique for its focus on ambiguous evidence and its careful attention to the effects of parameters interacting with each other. This allows for a novel and principled account of several acquisition puzzles. With its inter-disciplinary approach, this book will be of broad interest to syntacticians, language acquisitionists, and cognitive scientists of language.

The Acquisition of German: Introducing Organic Grammar brings together work on the acquisition of German from over four decades of child L1 and immigrant L2 learner studies. The book’s major feature is new longitudinal data from three secondary school students who began an exchange year in Germany with no German knowledge and attained fluency. Their naturalistic acquisition process — with a succession of stages described for the first time in L2 acquisition — is highly similar to that of younger learners. This has important implications for German teaching and for the theory of Universal Grammar and acquisition. Organic Grammar, a variant of generative syntax, is offered as a practical alternative to Chomsky’s Minimalism. The analysis focuses on extensive monthly samples of the three students’ German development in an input-rich environment. Similar to previous studies, the teenagers build syntactic structure from the bottom up. Two acquired correct word order by the end of the year, the third, who had greater conscious awareness of German grammar, had a divergent route of development, suggesting that language awareness can alter a natural developmental path. The results are addressed in light of recent debates in child-adult differences.