Acquisition Of Verb Placement Research Articles

Evidence of V to I raising in L2 Spanish

This article focuses on the acquisition of verb placement (adverb placement, subject–verb inversion in yes/no questions, subject–verb inversion in direct, indirect and pseudo wh-questions) in L2 Spanish. Four different elicitation tasks (an identification task, a grammaticality judgment task, a preference grammaticality task and a production task) were used for data collection. The subjects were 41 English adult L2 learners of Spanish at different proficiency levels (beginners, low intermediate, intermediate and advanced) according to an independent placement test. In line with Lardiere’s (1998a, 1998b, 2000) and Prévost and White’s (2000) findings, evidence for developments in syntax which is independent of developments in morphology is found in support of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. Although L2 learners’ verb-placement is target like at the surface level, their knowledge of verb agreement is poor and limited. That is, L2 learners appear to have reset the verb movement parameter in Spanish (i.e., [+movement]), even though they fail to morphologically mark the verb for person and number correctly, showing lack of knowledge that the inflections in Spanish I are strong. These findings suggest that there is a strong dissociation between syntax and morphology (Lardiere, 2000), but they will also be discussed in the light of some current theories on the acquisition of new values for uninterpretable syntactical features (Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007).

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

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.

Cues and economy in the acquisition of verb movement

In this paper we will discuss how economy principles interact with cues in the input in bilingual first language acquisition. We will look at the acquisition of verb placement in a child acquiring English and Norwegian simultaneously. Based on data from this child, it will be argued that when faced with ambiguous cues with respect to the verb movement parameter, children do not necessarily adopt the default, less marked setting. Rather, they may opt for a setting which yields an overall consistent grammar, even when this grammar contains operations that are more costly than those used in the target language. We will suggest that economy in acquisition may involve consistency in a grammar in correlation with economy in the more traditional sense within minimalism, where moving an element in general is considered more costly than not moving it (Chomsky 1995).

Competing language structures: the acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German-English children.

The simultaneous acquisition of two languages in early childhood presents an interesting test case for language acquisition theories. Children in bilingual environments receive input which could potentially lead to output systems different to those of monolingual children. The speech of three bilingual German-English children was recorded monthly between the ages of 2;0 and 5;0. The analysis of word order in the verb phrase shows that initial structural separation was followed by an extended period of non-target structures in German before the children eventually worked out which structures overlap and which structures differentiate the two languages. The bilingual data point towards language being acquired incrementally, on the basis of cue strength and cue cost. It is suggested that the partially overlapping structures in the input from German and English create structural saliencies for the child before they are functionally accessible. Functional identification eventually leads to structural separation.

The Acquisition of Verb Placement: Functional Categories and V2 Phenomena in Language Acquisition

Functional categories and verb placement in language development, J.M. Meisel the acquisition of the morphosyntax of finite verbs in English, A. Radford functional categories and early Swedish, C. Platzack accessing functional categories in Sesotho - interactions at the morpho-syntax interface, K. Demuth finiteness and verb placement in early child grammars - evidence from simultaneous acquisition of French and German in bilinguals, J.M. Meisel and N. Mueller language acquisition and competing linguistic representations - the child as arbiter, I. Gawlitzek-Maiwald et al the acquisition of agreement morphology and its syntactic consequences - new evidence on German child language from the Simone-Corpus, H. Clahsen and M. Penke verb movement, agreement, and tense in L2 acquisition, L. Eubank the ban on parameter resetting, default mechanisms, and the acquisition of V2 in Bernese Swiss German, Z. Penner routes to verb placement in early German and French - the independence of finiteness and agreement, M. Verrips, J. Weissenborn from the initial state to V2 - acquisition principles in action, T. Roeper the genesis of clausal structure, N. Hyams categories of first syntax, Be, Be+ing, and nothingness, V. Valian on the acquisition of functional categories - a general commentary, J. De Villiers.

Verb Placement in L2 Dutch

In this paper we report on the acquisition of verb placement in L2 Dutch by one Moroccan and one Turkish subject. The data originate from a three-year lon-gitudinal research project on spontaneous second language acquisition by adult immigrants which was financed by the European Science Foundation. After describing the routes the two L2 Dutch learners followed in their acquisition of verb placement, we compare our results with those obtained in the project entitled "Zweitspracherwerb italienischer und spanischer Arbeiter" on the acquisition of L2 German word order (the ZISA project). As the results of this project are relevant to our research in view of the structural similarities between Dutch and German, we began by trying to establish whether our data could be described in terms of the developmental sequence in the acquisition of word order in L2 German proposed by the ZISA group. The conclusion is that the implicational scale proposed by the ZISA group does not emerge from the data from our subjects. Neither can their acquisition of verb placement in L2 Dutch be explained in terms of the processing strategies suggested by the ZISA researchers. Instead we would like to suggest that the learners' preferences are attributable to the combined influence of source and target languages.

Jurgen M. Meisel (ed.), The Acquisition of Verb Placement: Functional Categories and V2 Phenomena in Language Acquisition, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992, vi+454 pp.

Jurgen M. Meisel (ed.), The Acquisition of Verb Placement: Functional Categories and V2 Phenomena in Language Acquisition, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992, vi+454 pp.

The acquisition of verb placement in Dutch and German

The acquisition of verb placement in Dutch and German

The acquisition of verb placement in German

The acquisition of verb placement in German