The acquisition of apparent optionality: Word order in subject and object shift constructions in Norwegian

This paper discusses the word order of object shift and so-called subject shift constructions in Norwegian child language. Corpus data from young children (up to the age of approximately 3) show that they produce non-target-consistent word order in these contexts, failing to move pronominal subjects and objects across negation or sentence adverbs. Furthermore, the findings show that target-like word order in subject shift constructions falls into place relatively early (around age 2;63;0), while the delay is more persistent in object shift constructions. The paper also provides results of experimental data from somewhat older children, which confirm these findings. Various factors are considered to explain these child data, e.g. pragmatic principles, prosody, syntactic economy and effects of frequency in the input. The paper concludes that the delay in movement can best be explained by a principle of economy, while the difference between the two constructions is accounted for by reference to input frequency.