Merete Anderssen

The Acquisition of Compositional Definiteness in Norwegian

This paper aim to explain why the prenominal definiteness marker found in modified structures only is acquired much later than the suffixal definite article in Norwegian. The coexistence of the two definiteness markers is the result of the so-called double definiteness phenomenon in Norwegian which occurs in definite structures involving an attributive adjective. As the prenominal determiner only occurs in modified contexts, one obvious explanation that presents itself is that the omission of the prenominal determiner is related to the fact that it is much less frequent in the input than the suffixal article. However, if we consider the form of this determiner, it is clear that the form itself must be very frequent in the input, as it is homophonous with the demonstrative and with inanimate third person pronouns, which are all frequent in use. Consequently, a lexical insertion approach to the double definiteness phenomenon is proposed according to which the discrepancy in the order of acquisition is argued to be due to a combination of prosodic saliency and the lexicalisation of semantic features, the latter of which will be dealt with here.

The Acquisition of Apparent Optionality: Word Order in Subject and Object Shift Constructions in Norwegian

This chapter discusses the word order of object shift and so-called subject shift constructions in Norwegian child language. Corpus data from young children (up to the age of approximately 3) show that they produce non-target-consistent word order in these contexts, failing to move pronominal subjects and objects across negation or sentence adverbs. Furthermore, the findings show that target-like word order in subject shift constructions falls into place relatively early (around age 2;6–3;0), while the delay is more persistent in object shift constructions. The paper also provides results of experimental data from somewhat older children which confirm these findings. In order to explain these child data, various factors are considered, e.g. pragmatic principles, prosody, syntactic economy and effects of frequency in the input. The paper concludes that the delay in movement can best be explained by a principle of economy, while the difference between the two constructions is accounted for by reference to input frequency.

Topicality and Complexity in the Acquisition of Norwegian Object Shift

This article investigates the acquisition of object shift in Norwegian child language. We show that object shift is complex derivationally, distributionally, and referentially, and propose a new analysis in terms of IP-internal topicalization. The results of an elicited production study with 27 monolingual Norwegian-speaking children (ages 4;05–7;00) reveal a prolonged delay in the acquisition of object shift with topical individuated pronominal objects. At the same time, we observe target-like placement and prosodic marking of contrastive, possessive, and indefinite pronouns, which do not shift. In our account of the observed delay we refer to the complexity models proposed by Yang (2002, 2004, 2005, 2010) and Hudson Kam & Newport (2005, 2009). In light of Yangs productivity model we argue that not shifting object pronouns is the rule, and OS is the exception. In light of Hudson Kam & Newports approach to complexity, we argue that the children perceive OS as an inconsistent operation.

Norwegian Object Shift as IP-internal topicalization

In this paper we discuss the phenomenon of Object Shift in Norwegian, and we show that this operation is more complex and discourse related than what has traditionally been assumed. We argue that Object Shift cannot be accounted for in a purely prosodic approach. Rather, we demonstrate that a common denominator for all objects undergoing Object Shift is that they are topics. We thus propose that Object Shift should be analysed as (IP-internal) topicalization. Furthermore, we discuss in detail the peculiar behaviour of the topical pronominal object det ‘it’ in cases where its referent is not an individuated, gender-agreeing noun, but rather a non-individuated referent, like a full clause, a VP or a type DP. In such cases, this pronoun typically refrains from Object Shift. We discuss the contrast between these types of objects and shifting objects in light of the topic hierarchy presented in Frascarelli & Hinterholzl (2007) and show that pronominal objects that undergo Object Shift have the characteristics of familiar topics , while det ‘it’ in the nonshifting contexts have the characteristics of aboutness topics . Consequently, we propose that Object Shift only applies to pronominal objects that constitute familiar topics.

The Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in Norwegian

The Given-before-New principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the Dative Alternation in Norwegian. In an experimental study, we investigate to what extent Norwegian childrens and adults’ sentence production is governed by givenness when the speaker chooses one word order over another. Our results suggest that givenness influences the word-order choices of both children and adults. However, children more often than adults tend to omit given recipients and have a tendency to produce prepositional datives even when the recipient represents given information. The results are discussed in light of previous acquisition findings and syntactic accounts of the phenomenon. We argue that childrens behavior is not a result of a pragmatic deficit or an immature syntactic component per se but rather a failure to consistently integrate the two.

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 Dative Alternation in Norwegian Child Language

Research has shown that givenness is one of several factors that influence the choice of word order with the Dative Alternation in languages such as English. This paper investigates to what extent Norwegian children between the ages of 4;2 and 6;0 are sensitive to this factor in production. In order to test this, an experiment was carried out in which the children were prompted to produce structures involving ditransitive verbs when either the Theme or the Recipient was given. The results show that the children are sensitive to the impact of givenness, but while this is expressed through the choice of word order in Theme-given contexts (yielding the prepositional dative), it is expressed by argument omission in the Recipient-given contexts (resulting in one-argument responses with only the Theme overtly produced).

The Acquisition of (Word Order) Variation

This book contains Chapters that investigate children’s acquisition of different types of variation in the primary linguistic data (PLD) that they are exposed to. Natural languages often display word order variation that may at first sight seem like instances of optionality. An example of this is the word order alternation in particle verb constructions in Norwegian, where the particle may precede or follow the direct object DP, illustrated in (1a, b)