1. Introduction In this paper it will be argued that a principle of information structure provided by Universal Grammar (UG) may interact with input in the acquisition of word order. In a study which investigates three children from the age of approximately 1;9 to 3 acquiring a Northern dialect of Norwegian, it has previously been shown that word order patterns in certain types of wh-questions ...

The topicalization of partial constituents has played a prominent role in the syntactic discussion of German since the phenomenon provides important empirical evidence for a number of theoretical issues. On the one hand, the construction raises the question which formal means the grammatical architecture has to provide in order to license such fronted partial constituents. Under the so-called r...

Grimshaw (1997) gives an optimality theoretic analysis of English dosupport. She also claims that due to a different constraint ranking, a language like German does not have the equivalent to English semantically empty do. In this article we present a counterexample to this claim: semantically empty do is obligatorily inserted with VP topicalization in Standard German. In support of these data,...

Previous research has shown that certain discourse conditions are necessary for the felicitous use of non-canonical syntactic forms like topicalization, left-dislocation, and clefts. However, the distribution of these forms does not correlate one-to-one with the presence of these conditions, and a system that generates these statisticallyrare forms based only on these conditions will overgenera...

A growing number of syntacticians are supplementing their own intuitions with formal experiments, collecting and analyzing acceptability judgments from theoretically naïve native speakers. This paper applies this experimental approach to test a set of interrelated hypotheses in Chinese syntax: that extraction from conjunct islands is more acceptable than extraction from adjunct islands; that ex...