Subject-verb Word Order in Narratives in Swedish by Immersion and Non-immersion Students

Abstract

The Swedish V2 word order has been considered a notorious source of difficulty for L2 learners due to its strict rules. This study explores subject-verb word order in texts written in Swedish by 12-year-old and 15-year-old Finnish-speaking immersion students and by 16-year-old non-immersion students. Although the L1 of the informants lacks obligatory inversion, the analyses show that informants in all three groups have reached a high accuracy level in several aspects of word order in main clauses. However, the informants struggle with challenges that are similar to those detected in previous research: inversion is omitted in its obligatory occasions in main clauses but simultaneously overused in subordinate clauses where word order is canonical. In main clauses, the challenges focus on declarative main clauses with inversion. In subordinate clauses, on the contrary, the challenges focus on questions.