The Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in Norwegian

Abstract

The Given-before-New principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the Dative Alternation in Norwegian. In an experimental study, we investigate to what extent Norwegian children's and adults’ sentence production is governed by givenness when the speaker chooses one word order over another. Our results suggest that givenness influences the word-order choices of both children and adults. However, children more often than adults tend to omit given recipients and have a tendency to produce prepositional datives even when the recipient represents given information. The results are discussed in light of previous acquisition findings and syntactic accounts of the phenomenon. We argue that children's behavior is not a result of a pragmatic deficit or an immature syntactic component per se but rather a failure to consistently integrate the two.