The surprisingly high proportion of Verb Second in causal adverbial clauses with wil ‘because’ in child Swiss German

Abstract

Clauses introduced by wil ‘because’ are compatible with two verb-placement patterns: verb-final and Verb Second (V2), which are usually not interchangeable. The focus of this study is on the frequency of occurrence of the V2 pattern and its function in Swiss German, based on an analysis of the speech of two children whose acquisition of verb placement is unusual. Instead of using the verb-final pattern typical of embedded clauses, they extend verb movement from matrix clauses to embedded clauses, resulting in a verb-movement grammar before age 5. Only in clauses introduced by wil does verb movement result in genuine V2. Moreover, most of the children's wil-clauses produced before age 5 provide an answer to a question with warum ‘why’, a context in which Swiss-German adults predominantly use the verb-final pattern. An examination of the weil-clauses in two German corpora reveals that adults rarely use V2 in answer to a warum-question, but German children appear to overuse it in this context, although they have acquired the verb-final pattern, in contrast to the Swiss children. Thus the surprisingly high proportion of wil + V2 in the Swiss-German child data may not be a consequence of their verb-movement grammar, but rather the result of overextending V2 to a context in which adults generally use the verb-final pattern.