Christian Waldmann

Moving in small steps towards verb second : A case study

This paper examines rule-based learning and item-based learning in relation to a Swedish childs acquisition of verb second in main clauses. While rule-based accounts assert that young children hav ...

Object Shift in spoken Mainland Scandinavian: A corpus study of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish

Recent work on Object Shift (OS) suggests that this is not as uniform an operation as traditionally assumed. In this paper, we examine OS in the spontaneous speech of adults in large Danish, Norweg ...

The Acquisition of Neg-V and V-Neg Order in Embedded Clauses in Swedish: A Microparametric Approach

This article examines the acquisition of embedded verb placement in Swedish children, focusing on Neg-V and V-Neg order. It is proposed that a principle of economy of movement creates an overuse of V-Neg order in embedded clauses and that the low frequency of the target-consistent Neg-V order in child-directed speech obstructs children from revising their initial hypothesis about the verb placement in embedded clauses, creating a delay in the acquisition of Neg-V. However, it is also demonstrated that, despite the lack of clear evidence for the Neg-V order in Swedish childrens input, the children distinguish between different types of embedded clauses in the acquisition of Neg-V and V-Neg order already between the age of 3 and 4 years, supporting a microparametric approach to language acquisition. Comparing child-directed Swedish and child-directed German, it is further proposed that the presence of clear evidence for verb-final in the input to German children aids error-free acquisition of embedded verb placement in German.