Westergaard (2009): The Acquisition of Word Order: Micro-Cues, Information Structure, and Economy #

This file formalizes the syntactic model of Westergaard's monograph. Verb second is not one parameter but a setting per clause-type head of a split ForceP, one head per sentence type in root clauses and one each for embedded declaratives and embedded questions, so that a language's grammar is the set of cells, a sentence type in an embedding context, in which the finite verb moves to the left periphery. Her Table 3.1 gives that set for six Germanic varieties. The fragments record, from the reference grammars and from her own descriptions, where verb second is obligatory, optional or excluded, and her binary settings agree with them: each grammar contains the cells where the fragment requires verb second and lies within the cells where it allows it, and for five of the six varieties it is exactly the required cells. What children acquire are micro-cues, pieces of structure stating for one cell what its specifier holds and whether the verb fills its head, and four cues separate the five grammars of her Table 3.2. In the Tromsø dialect the monosyllabic wh-words ka, kem and kor are heads and sit in Int⁰ themselves, which blocks verb movement there; the verb second that still occurs is movement to a lower Top⁰, whose feature a given subject checks from the specifier and a focused subject leaves for the verb, so that these questions are verb second exactly when the subject is new.

Main definitions #

V2Grammar: a set of cells, the clause-type heads the finite verb moves to.
stdNorwegian, stdEnglish, nordmore, belfast, german, danish: the grammars of Table 3.1.
MicroCue, Expresses: a cue and its expression by a grammar.
TromsøWh, WhStatus, order: the Tromsø wh-words, their status, and the word order of a monosyllabic wh-question.

Main results #

table_3_1_eq_required, danish_table_3_1: Table 3.1 against the fragments.
nordmore_english_mirror, embedded_german_polar_all: the mirror image and the two universals read off the fragments.
table_3_2, not_expresses_both: the four cues separate the five grammars.
rows_consistent: every judged word order in the data is consistent with its fragment.
isV2_order_iff: a Tromsø monosyllabic wh-question is verb second iff its subject is new.

Implementation notes #

Westergaard's Fin⁰ and Wh⁰ heads are realized as the embedded root-like cells of Bhatt and Dayal: German complementizer-less verb-second complements and Belfast English embedded inversion are both quasiSubordinated, and her Wh⁰ is the yes/no cell her Belfast example instantiates. Danish is the one variety whose table entry is not the fragment's required set, since only some Danish exclamatives are verb second. The cues (57) and (60) for verb movement to I°, which she motivates with Icelandic, the cue for English inflectional elements, som-insertion, focus-sensitive adverbs, kanskje, and the acquisition chapters are not formalized; the Tromsø rows have no fragment and enter only the wh-word model.

Westergaard (2009): The Acquisition of Word Order: Micro-Cues, Information Structure, and Economy #

Main definitions #

Main results #

Implementation notes #

References #

Micro-parameters (Table 3.1) #

Micro-cues (§4) #

The rows #

Wh-heads and information structure (§3.2, §3.3) #