Where Scrambling Begins: Triggering Object Scrambling at the Early Stage in German and Bernese Swiss German

Stepping stones and stumbling blocks. Why negation accelerates and additive particles delay the acquisition of finiteness in German

“…Learner utterances in which the particles precede a verb as in the following example (from Penner et al, 2000) have given rise to different analyses.…”

“…(8) Florian, 2;08 (lies down and places toy man next to himself) mann auch schlafte man also sleep Penner et al (2000) as well as Tracy (2002) consider these particles as syntactic precursors of finiteness and claim that auch and nicht project their own roots and take VP as their complement. Similar to the 'flipping pivot' analysis presented above, the particles are the head of a Focus-Particle Phrase (FP).…”

“…Such elements are not referring to anything, but rather specifying the relation between other pieces of information given in the utterance, or between information in the utterance and the (non)-verbal context. Several studies have found that for German, negative particles like nein ('no') and nicht ('not') and the additive particle auch ('also') are among the first elements of this sort (Dimroth 2002, Nederstigt 2003, Penner, Tracy, and Weissenborn 2000. It has also been suggested that utterances containing these expressions are somehow more advanced and can help the child and the untutored L2 learner to develop from the lexical structure of their early utterances towards a more target-like finite utterance structure (Dimroth et al 2003, Penner et al 2000.…”

“…Several studies have found that for German, negative particles like nein ('no') and nicht ('not') and the additive particle auch ('also') are among the first elements of this sort (Dimroth 2002, Nederstigt 2003, Penner, Tracy, and Weissenborn 2000. It has also been suggested that utterances containing these expressions are somehow more advanced and can help the child and the untutored L2 learner to develop from the lexical structure of their early utterances towards a more target-like finite utterance structure (Dimroth et al 2003, Penner et al 2000. But although nicht and auch have broadly comparable syntactic properties in German, they do not develop on a par in further stages of language acquisition.…”

“…The study of negation in the first and second language acquisition of German has a much longer tradition (Becker 2005, Clahsen 1988, Dietrich & Grommes 1998, Meisel 1997, Verrips & Weissenborn 1992, Wode 1977 than the study of additive particles like auch (Benazzo 2003, Berger et al 2007, Dimroth 2002, Hulk 2003, Nederstigt 2003, Penner et al 2000, Schimke, Verhagen, and Dimroth 2008, Tracy 2002.…”