Full Description
This collection of papers investigates two specific linguistic phenomena from the point of view of first- and second-language acquisition. While observations on the acquisition of scrambling or pronominal clitics can be found in the literature, up until the recent past they were sparse and often buried in other issues. This volume fills a long-existing gap in providing a collection of articles which focus on language acquisition but at the same time address the overarching syntactic issues involved (for example, the X-bar status of clitics, base-generation vs. movement accounts of scrambling). This volume contains an overview of L1 (and, in one case, L2) acquisition data from a number of different languages including Bernese, Swiss, German, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish, as well as from several theoretical points of view with these two clause-internal processes at its center. These language acquisition data are considered to be crucial in the validation of analyses of these specific linguistic phenomena in adult grammars. The contributions in this volume include the earliest thoughts in this vein and, for this reason, should be viewed as a starting point for discussions within theoretical linguistics and language acquisition alike.
Contents
Introduction: The Acquisition of Clause-internal Rules.- I: Scrambling.- Scrambling: What's the State of the Art?.- An Experimental Study of Scrambling and Object Shift in the Acquisition of Dutch.- Object Scrambling and Specificity in Dutch Child Language.- Scrambling in the Acquisition of English?.- Where Scrambling Begins: Triggering Object Scrambling at the Early Stage in German and Bernese Swiss German.- II: Cliticization.- Overview: The Grammar (and Acquisition) of Clitics.- Parameters and Cliticization in Early Child German.- On the Non-parallelism in the Acquisition of Reflexive and Non-reflexive Object Clitics.- Dissociations in the Acquisition of Clitic Pronouns by Dysphasic Children: A Case Study from Italian.- The Acquisition of Clitic Doubling in Spanish.- The Automatic Identification and Classification of Clitic Pronouns.- The L2 Acquisition of Cliticization in Standard German.- III: Related Issues.- Null Subjects in Early Child English and the Theory of Economy of Projection.- The PP-CP Parallelism Hypothesis and Language Acquisition: Evidence from Swedish.- Negation, Infinitives and Heads.- Left-branch Extraction as Operator Movement: Evidence from Child Dutch.
