Word order and finiteness in acquisition: A study of English and Norwegian wh-questions

Children acquiring languages such as English, German or Dutch typically go through a phase where they produce non-finite root clauses, often referred to as the Optional Infinitive (OI) stage. But there is a difference between English on the one hand and the other Germanic languages on the other with respect to the occurrence of non-finite wh-questions: while there is a high number of OIs in English in this context, non-finite wh-questions are virtually non-existent in child data of e.g. German or Swedish. This is often argued to be due to the early setting of the V2 parameter. Comparing Norwegian and English child data on wh-questions, this paper argues that there is no such parameter and that children instead are sensitive to fine syntactic distinctions in the input called micro-cues. On this view, both English and Norwegian have restricted V2 in wh-questions. The paper also shows that there is no causal correlation between finiteness morphology and word order in this context. Children’s non-finite root clauses are argued to generally be caused by a problem realizing auxiliaries, in both languages, and the difference between English and Norwegian is due to the type of verb required in wh-questions (auxiliaries vs. lexical verbs)

The Interaction of Input and UG in the Acquisition of Verb Movement in a Dialect of Norwegian

In this paper it is argued that a principle of information structure provided by Universal Grammar (UG) may interact with input in the acquisition of word order. In a study which investigates three children from the age of approximately 1;9 to 3 acquiring a Northern dialect of Norwegian, it has previously been shown that word order patterns in certain types of wh-questions which are sensitive to subtle distinctions in the information value of the subject (given vs. new) are acquired extremely early (Westergaard 2003a). This paper presents a study of the same children’s topicalization constructions, and it is shown that, although these patterns of information structure do not appear in the input, the children nevertheless show traces of these patterns in the non-target forms that they occasionally produce. Thus, in their very early production of topicalization constructions the children seem to be guided by a word order principle based on information structure, which could be taken as support for this as a word order preferred by UG

On the Acquisition of Word Order in WH-Questions in theTromsø Dialect

This article reports on a study of three children acquiring a dialect of Norwegian which allows two different word orders in certain types of WH-questions, verb second (V2) and and verb third (V3). The latter is only allowed after monosyllabic WH-words, while the former, which is the result of verb movement, is the word order found in all other main clauses in the language. It is shown that both V2 and V3 are acquired extremely early by the children in the study (before the age of two), and that subtle distinctions between the two orders with respect to information structure are attested from the beginning. However, it is argued that V3 word order, which should be ìsimplerî than the V2 structure as it does not involve verb movement, is nevertheless acquired slightly later in its full syntactic form. This is taken as an indication that the V3 structure is syntactically more complex, and possibly also more marked

Grammatical Gender in American Norwegian Heritage Language: Stability or Attrition?

This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permissionThis paper investigates possible attrition/change in the gender system of Norwegian heritage language spoken in America. Based on data from 50 speakers in the Corpus of American Norwegian Speech (CANS), we show that the three-gender system is to some extent retained, although considerable overgeneralization of the masculine (the most frequent gender) is attested. This affects both feminine and neuter gender forms, while declension class markers such as the definite suffix remain unaffected. We argue that the gender category is vulnerable due to the lack of transparency of gender assignment in Norwegian. Furthermore, unlike incomplete acquisition, which may result in a somewhat different or reduced gender system, attrition is more likely to lead to general erosion, eventually leading to complete loss of gender

Introduction

The third volume of the 34th edition of Nordlyd contains the proceedings for a workshop on language acquisition that took place at the Twenty Second Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (SCL 22). The overall theme of the conference was 'brain, mind and language,' and the workshop invited abstracts in first, second and bilingual acquisition related to this theme. SCL 22 was held at the Centre For Linguistics (CFL) at the University of Aalborg in Denmark on June 19–22, 2006, under the auspices of the Nordic Association of Linguists (NAL)

Verb Second Word Order in Norwegian Heritage Language: Syntax and Pragmatics

Posted with permission of Georgetown University Press.In this paper, we investigate verb second (V2) word order in Norwegian heritage language spoken in the United States, i.e., in a situation where the heritage speakers have English as their dominant language. We show that not only the syntax of V2 may be affected in a heritage language situation, but that the number of contexts for this word order may also be severely reduced (i.e., non-subject-initial declaratives). V2 languages typically have a high proportion of non-subject-initial declaratives in spontaneous speech, while English declaratives are mainly subject-initial. The reduction of non-subject-initial declaratives (the context for V2) is thus argued to be the result of cross-linguistic influence from English. We also show that this correlates with non-target-consistent word order, in that the fewer contexts for V2 that speakers produce, the more non-target-consistent non-V2 word order appear in their data. We also discuss to what extent there is a causal relationship between the two phenomena

Grammatical Gender and Declension Class in Language Change: A Study of the Loss of Feminine Gender in Norwegian

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected

The acquisition of English articles among L1 Dagbani L2 English learners

This study investigates the acquisition of articles in L2 English by L1 speakers of Dagbani, a Gur language spoken in Ghana. Dagbani differs from English in that it has two definite articles, no indefinite article, and a zero-article which may express definiteness, indefiniteness as well as genericity. The study consisted of a Forced-choice task (FCT) and an Acceptability judgement task (AJT) which were administered to Dagbani teenagers with an intermediate proficiency in English (n = 45) and a group of native English speakers as controls (n = 8). The results showed that the learners’ article choice was based on definiteness, not specificity (i.e., no fluctuation between the two) and that they had slightly more problems with indefinite than definite contexts, while generic contexts were the most problematic. Except for a certain task effect as well as a possible interference of instruction (in the FCT), the results can be argued to generally be due to influence from the L1 and to the difficulty of feature reassembly

Syntax Matters: Exploring the Effect of Linguistic Similarity in Third Language Acquisition

Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an artificial L3 and preexisting grammars impact crosslinguistic influence at the very beginning of the acquisition process. We exposed four groups of 30 Norwegian–English bilinguals each to one of four L3s and gave them training in that L3. The participants gave forced-choice acceptability judgments on pairs of nonsubject-initial declarative clauses that differed in word order, one grammatical in English, the other grammatical in Norwegian. The participants had not been exposed to nonsubject-initial declaratives during the exposure and training phases to avoid confounds with learning. The results showed that both lexical and syntactic similarities affect crosslinguistic influence. We discuss this result considering contemporary accounts of L3 acquisition