Embedded V-To-C in Child Grammar: The Acquisition of Verb Placement in Swiss German

424 Pages·2001·10.32 MB·English

by  Manuela Schönenberger (auth.)

EMBEDDED V-TO-C-IN CHILD GRAMMAR:
THE ACQUISITION OF VERB PLACEMENT IN SWISS GERMAN
STUDIES IN THEORETICAL PSYCHOL INGUISTICS
VOLUME 27
Managing Editors
Lyn Frazier, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Thomas Roeper, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Kenneth Wexler, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Editorial Board
Robert Berwick, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Manfred Bierwisch, Zentralinstitut fur Sprachwissenschaft, Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Berlin
Merrill Garrett, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Lila Gleitman, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
Mary-Louise Kean, University of California, Irvine
Howard Lasnik, University of Connecticut at Storrs
John Marshall, Neuropsychology Unit, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford
Daniel Osherson, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Yukio Otsu, Keio University, Tokyo
Edwin Williams, Princeton University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
EMBEDDEDV-TO-C
IN CHILD GRAMMAR:
THE ACQUISITION OF
VERB PLACEMENT
IN SWISS GERM AN
by
MANUELASCHÖNENBERGER
Institut für Linguistik: Anglistik, Universität Stuttgart
Stuttgart, Germany
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.Y.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-7923-7186-1 ISBN 978-94-010-0798-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-010-0798-6
All Rights Reserved
© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001
No part ofthe material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
inc\uding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE ...................................................................................... ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................. xi
NOTATION ................................................................................. xiii
INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... xix
GENERAL PROPERTIES OF SWISS GERMAN
1 Introduction ......................................................................... 1
2 The Verbal and Nominal System of Swiss German ...................... 2
2.1 The Verbal System ................................................................ 2
2.1.1 Agreement and Tense ............................................................ 2
2.1.2 Mood .................................................................................. 5
2.2 The Nominal System ............................................................. 6
3 Verb Placement in Swiss German ............................................. 7
3.1 General Patterns .................................................................... 7
3.2 The Position of the Finite Verb in Matrix Clauses ........................ 8
3.2.1 Verb First ............................................................................ 8
3.2.2 Verb Second ...................................................................... 10
3.3 The Position of the Finite Verb in Embedded Clauses ................ 11
3.3.1 Verb First .......................................................................... II
3.3.2 Verb Second ...................................................................... 12
3.3.3 Verb-Final ......................................................................... 21
3.4 Summary ........................................................................... 22
3.5 Some Observations on Embedded Clauses ............................... 25
3.5.1 Verb Raising and Verb-Projection Raising ............................... 25
3.5.2 Doubly-Filled COMPs .......................................................... 29
3.5.3 Relative Clauses ................................................................. 30
4 The Distribution of Nominals ................................................ 32
4.1 Scrambling ........................................................................ 32
4.2 Omission of Nominal Expressions .......................................... 33
v
4.2.1 Topic Drop ........................................................................ 33
4.2.2 Pro-Drop ........................................................................... 34
4.2.3 Omission of a Non-2sg Pronominal Subject ............................. 35
5 Various Analyses of Verb Placement ...................................... 38
5.1 The Traditional Analysis ...................................................... 39
5.2 Zwart's Analysis ................................................................. 41
5.3 The Split-CP Hypothesis ...................................................... 43
2 NATURAL PRODUCTION DATA ON VERB PLACEMENT IN
LUCERNESE
1 Introduction ....................................................................... 49
2 Survey of Acquisition Literature on Subordination in German
and Swiss German ............................................................... 51
2.1 German Acquisition Data on Verb Placement in Embedded
Contexts ............................................................................ 51
2.2 Swiss-German Acquisition Data on Verb Placement in Embedded
Contexts ............................................................................ 56
2.2.1 Bemese Acquisition Data ..................................................... 56
2.2.2 Zurich-German Acquisition Data ........................................... 59
3 Verb Placement in the Lucemese Acquisition Data .................... 62
3.1 Overview of the Spontaneous Production Data. ......................... 63
3.2 Embedded Clauses Not Introduced by a Subordinator ................ 70
3.2.1 Embedded Verb First Without a Complementizer. ..................... 70
3.2.2 Declarative Embedded Verb Second ....................................... 75
3.3 Clauses Introduced by a Subordinator ..................................... 80
3.3.1 Clauses Introduced by a Subordinating Conjunction ...................8 1
3.3.2 Relative Clauses Introduced by the Relative Complementizerwo 108
3.3.3 Wh-Complements .............................................................. 120
3.3.4 Free Relative Clauses .......................................................... 130
3.3.5 Doubly-Filled COMPs ......................................................... 132
3.4 Summary .......................................................................... 135
4 Unclear Verb Placement in the Children's Spontaneous
Production Data ................................................................. 137
4.1 Verb Copying and Doubling ofSubjectJObject ........................ 137
4.2 Unclear Non-Target-Consistent Verb Placement ...................... 145
5 Placeholders and Clauses in Which the Complementizer Has
Been Omitted .................................................................... 150
6 Summary .......................................................................... 155
vi
3 ELICITED DATA ON VERB PLACEMENT IN LUCERNESE
1 Introduction ...................................................................... 157
2 Elicited Answers to Questions .............................................. 157
3 Elicitation Sessions ............................................................ 159
3.1 Elicitation I: Moira and Eliza at Age 5;0 ................................. 159
3.2 Elicitation II: Moira at Age 5;05 ........................................... 168
3.3 Elicitation III: Moira and Eliza after Age 5;05 ......................... 173
4 Experimental Data .............................................................. 180
5 Summary .......................................................................... 185
4 NATURAL PRODUCTION DATA ON MATRIX CLAUSES
1 Introduction ...................................................................... 187
2 Moira's Matrix Clauses ...................................................... 187
2.1 Moira's Matrix Clauses at Age 3;10 ....................................... 188
2.1.1 The Clause-Initial Constituent in Declarative Clauses ............... 188
2.1.2 Non-Declarative Matrix Clauses .......................................... .192
2.1.3 The Distribution of Pronominal Subjects ................................ 193
2.1.4 The Position of the Postverbal Subject ................................... 195
2.1.5 Summary .......................................................................... 196
2.2 Moira's Matrix Clauses at Age 4;11.. ..................................... 198
2.3 Moira's Matrix Clauses at Age 6;0 ........................................ 201
2.4 Summary .......................................................................... 203
3 Omission of Clause-Initial Constituents in Child Grarnmar ......... 203
4 A Comparision of Matrix Clauses Produced by the Child and the
Adult .......................................................................... : .... 205
4.1 Rate of Omission of Clause-Initial Constituents ....................... 205
4.2 The Distribution ofpronominal Subjects and Objects ................ 208
4.3 Pro-Drop .......................................................................... 210
4.4 The Postverbal Subject ........................................................ 212
5 Summary .......................................................................... 213
5 AN ANALYSIS
I Introduction ...................................................................... 215
2 Summary of the Acquisition Data Presented in Chapter 2. .......... 218
3 Input, Verb-Projection Raising, and Extraposition .................... 222
3.1 How Ambiguous is the Input with Respect to Verb Placement? .. 224
3.1.1 What Might the Child's Hypothesis about Verb Placement Be? .. 232
Vll
3.1.2 Is the Input a Gennan or Bemese-Speaking Child Receives
Less Ambiguous? .............................................................. 233
3.2 Can Overgeneralization of Rightward Movement Explain the
Acquisition Data? .............................................................. 234
3.2.1 Overgeneralization of Verb-Projection Raising ........................ 235
3.2.2 Massive Extraposition ......................................................... 241
4 A Critical Re-Examination of the Acquisition Data ................... 246
4.1 Clauses Introduced by a Subordinating Conjunction. ................. 247
4.1.1 Topicalization ................................................................... 251
4.1.2 The Distribution of Atonic Subject Pronouns ........................... 255
4.1.3 Subject Omission ............................................................... 260
4.1.4 Occurrence of a Non-Pronominal Subject ............................... 266
4.1.5 Summary .......................................................................... 269
4.2 Verb Movement in Clauses Introduced by a Complementizer ..... 276
4.3 Verb Movement in Relative Clauses ...................................... 280
4.4 Verb Movement in Wh-Complements .................................... 282
4.5 Summary .......................................................................... 284
5 An Analysis ...................................................................... 286
5.1 Verb Movement in the Target Grammar ................................. 286
5.2 A Previous Account in Tenns of the Children's Miscategorization
of the Class of Complementizers ........................................... 289
5.3 A New Account ................................................................. 293
5.3.1 Verb Movement in Embedded Clauses ................................... 294
5.3.2 Embedded V2 ................................................................... .308
5.3.3 The Onset of the Verb-Final Pattem ....................................... 310
6 Conclusions ...................................................................... 315
6 SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS ...................... 317
APPENDIX I
Verb-Placement Tables ....................................................... 323
APPENDIX II
Sample Sentences Used during Elicitation ............................... 353
APPENDIX III
Omission of a Clause-Initial Subject in Declarative Matrix
Clauses in Child and Adult Grammar .................................... .367
APPENDIX IV
The Nature ofZ ................................................................. 371
REFERENCES ............................................................................. .399
INDEX ....................................................................................... 405
viii
PREFACE
This book attempts to combine language acquisition and syntactic theory and
is addressed both to linguists working in the field of language acquisition and
to those working on theoretical syntax. Although I hope that both audiences
may find something worthy of their attention, I suspect that the focus of
interest may be quite different for the two groups, thus making it difficult to
please both at once. I would expect language acquisitionists to be particularly
interested in the production aspects of the data, which are discussed at length
in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, while syntacticians might find these chapters overly
detailed. Chapter 5 is the most theoretical and syntax-oriented. For the
convenience of those who are less interested in production aspects I have
provided detailed summaries of the data throughout Chapters 2, 3, and 4. It
should therefore be possible to skim intermediate sections while maintaining
an overall view of the data. Chapter I should be of interest to both audiences.
It provides a very broad overview of Swiss-German syntax and is intended to
acquaint the reader with the Swiss-German language in general, over and
above verb placement. I have deliberately included material which is not
directly related to verb placement so that in later chapters I can solely focus
on verb placement and ignore other linguistic features of Swiss German
which might distract the reader.
IX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee,
Liliane Haegeman, Gottfried Kolde, Henk van Riemsdijk, Luigi Rizzi, and
Ken Wexler. I have particularly appreciated my thesis advisor Liliane
Haegeman, who guided me in my research for many years and has inspired
me with many new ways of looking at Swiss-German syntax. I am indebted
to Luigi Rizzi for various discussions of the topic of my thesis and other
issues relating to Swiss-German syntax. Both Liliane and Luigi have been
marvellous teachers. It is due to them that my interest in linguistics was first
aroused. I am very grateful to Ken Wexler for making a one-year stay at MIT
a very pleasant and memorable one, for always promptly answering my e
mail questions, and encouraging me to continue when I found the going
difficult.
I thank the two anonymous reviewers who have taken the trouble to read a
very lengthy manuscript and for providing me with many important and
detailed critical comments.
I would like to express my gratitude to Ian Roberts and Sten Vikner, who
have been indispensable to me in the process of writing this book. Ian and
Sten have both spent many hours with me in Stuttgart discussing linguistic
issues which are close to my heart. I particularly thank Ian for always being
very positive about my work and Sten for being very critical. Both have
provided me with many insightful comments.
There are many other people who have been invaluable during this period
of my life. Thanks to Eric Haeberli, Christopher Laenzlinger and Genoveva
Puskas for many discussions linguistic and otherwise and for generally
contributing to my wonderful time at the University of Geneva. Thanks also
to Stefano Bertolo, Mary Ellen Bushnell, Thomas Lee, Edson Miyamoto,
Izumi Nishi, Vicenc Torrens, and Michael Ullmann for making my stay at
MIT, and in Boston, an enjoyable one.
Other linguists have contributed in various ways to the completion of this
work. I wish to express my thanks to Enoch Aboh, Werner Abraham, Kai
Alter, Thomas Bader, Josef Bayer, Adriana Belletti, Darcy Bruce Berry,
Anna Cardinaletti, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Anita Fetzer, Claire Foley, Claire
Forel, Werner Frey, Peter Gallmann, Corinne Grange, Teresa Guasti, Hubert
Haider, Cornelia Hamann, Almut Klepper-Schudlo, Astrid Kriihenmann,
Andre Meinunger, Gereon Miiller, Zvi Penner, Tom Roeper, Jean Rutten,
Tanja Schmid, Petra Schulz, Bonnie Schwartz, Ur Shlonsky, Michal Starke,
Xl