Abstract
Abstract The present work deals with production difficulties associated with German word order rules and examines how word order and subject-verb agreement relate to one another in the interlanguage development of learners of German as a second language, paying particular attention to the perspective of the learner regarding their language production. It will be argued that the production difficulties with subject-verb inversion (INVERSION) and verb-final placement in subordinate clauses (V-FINAL) as well as the tendency in learners to produce SVO structures instead of INVERSION and V-FINAL, are consequences caused by a specific way of processing used by the leaner in trying to realize the subject-verb agreement that is typical of German. Over the course of the interlanguage development, the processing of word order, in turn, influences the processing of subject-verb agreement so that learners rarely produce subject-verb agreement errors in structures having SVO word order, while on the other hand, they occur frequently in structures that deviate from SVO word order. It is assumed that factors such as the acquisition context (natural/instructed), transfer from previously acquired languages and age-related, cognitive maturity play an important role in the acquisition of subject-verb agreement.
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