Object-initial languages

[Ellen F. Prince]

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Date:    Fri, 25 Oct 2002 13:49:31 -0400
From:    Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu>
To:      <FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu>
cc:      "Ellen F. Prince" <ellen at central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: Object-initial languages

The claim that German children begin with SOV order, which was proposed at
about the same time in the late 1970s by Clahsen and by Park, is based
largely on sentences with either SV or OV order and seldom both.  There are
virtually no sentences in the earliest corpora with full SOV order.  Meisel
and Pienemann linked these SOV analyses to parallel analyses for L2 German,
but with similar interpretive problems.  Peter Jordens reviewed these claims
critically about 1990 pointing to the various flaws in the analyses.
Despite the clarity of Jordens arguments, workers in German child language
continue to accept the notion that children begin with SOV.  I can only
assume that they do so because of other theoretical commitments and not
because of the superficial pattern of the data.

My own interpretation of this literature and the relevant data is that
German children start with a competition between fragmentary SV, OV, and VO
item-based constructions.  (VS is rare, and VO seems to arise from
imperatives.)  They then use these during the third year to develop SVO
templates when the main verb is tensed and SOV templates when it is not.
Relative clauses, of course, come in much later and it would seem strange to
me to argue that they would be the basis of learning of these central main
clause patterns.

- --Brian MacWhinney

P.S.  I'm still hoping that someone will take a plunge and try to answer
Ron's question.

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Um, Brian -- your second paragraph seems to indicate that you too assume
that OV order comes first and that general declarative Verb-Second
(masquerading as SVO when the lexical verb and the tense are both simple)
doesn't set in until the acquisition of tense. Or am I missing something?

Btw, I don't know of ANYONE saying that relative clauses are the
source of children's SOV order. What the syntacticians say is that
relative clause do not undergo the Verb-Second Constraint and thus
the basic SOV order is transparent in them.

Ellen