The Acquisition of Scrambling and Cliticization [Paperback]

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.Introduction: The Acquisition of Clause-internal Rules; S.M. Powers, C. Hamann. Part I: Scrambling. Scrambling: What's the State of the Art? H. Haider. An Experimental Study of Scrambling and Object Shift in the Acquisition of Dutch; I. Barbier. Object Scrambling and Specificity in Dutch Child Language; J. Schaeffer. Scrambling in the Acquisition of English? S.M. Powers. Where Scrambling Begins: Triggering Object Scrambling at the Early Stage in German and Bernese Swiss German; Z. Penner, et al. Part II: Cliticization. Overview: The Grammar (and Acquisition) of Clitics; A. Cardinaletti, M. Starke. Parameters and Cliticization in Early Child German; M. Haverkort, J. Weissenborn. OlC*