Workshop on Inversion and Verb Movement

Triggering V2: On the Frequency of the Input Cue and Possible Consequences for Language Change

Marit R. Westergaard
University of Tromsø, NORMS/CASTL

In this paper I discuss both the acquisition and the historical loss of V2, investigating adult and child data from a dialect of Nor­wegian (Tromsø) and some historical data from English. In both cases we seem to be dealing with mixed V2 systems, where there is verb movement and V2 word order in some clause types, but not in others. Additionally, there are some lexical exceptions with particular adverbs. I discuss this within Light­foot's (1999, 2006) cue-based approach to acquisition and change, which argues that a cue must be relatively robustly expressed in the primary linguistic data for a construction to be acquired (a suggested figure is 30%) - otherwise children will ignore it and the construction will be lost from the language.