Ebook: The Acquisition of Verb Placement: Functional Categories and V2 Phenomena in Language Acquisition

other aspects of developing grammars. And this is, indeed, what the contributions to this volume do. Parameterization of functional categories may, however, be understood in different ways, even if one shares the dual assumptions that substantive elements (verbs, nouns, etc. ) are present in all grammars and that X-bar principles are part of the grammatical knowledge available to the child prior to language-specific learning processes. From these assumptions it follows that the child should, from early on, be able to construct projections on the basis of these elements. The role of functional categories, however, may still be interpreted differently. One possibility, first suggested by Radford (1986, 1990) and by Guilfoyle and Noonan (1988), is that children must discover which functional categories (FC) need to be implemented in the grammar of the language they are acquiring. Another possibility, first explored by Hyams (1986), is that a specific category is present in developing grammars but that parameter values are set in a way deviating from the target adult grammar, corresponding, however, to options realized in other adult systems. A third option would be that these categories might be specified differently in developing as opposed to mature grammars. All three are explored in the papers collected in this volume. Before outlining the various hypotheses in more detail, however, I would like briefly to sketch the grammatical context in which the following debate is situated. 2.

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The twelve original contributions in this volume all focus on the question of whether developing grammars contain, at each stage of language acquisition, the full range of functional categories such as INFL, AGR, or COMP.
The crucal evidence examined is the placement of verbs, especially in verb-second constructions. Since the position of verbal elements depends in the finiteness distinction, viz. on the presence of agreement and tense markings, the development of these phenomena is studied as well. Although there is consensus among the authors of the volume that grammars in the course of language acquisition conform at each stage to the principles of universal grammar, they disagree on whether the full repertoire of functional categories is available from early on or whether some are implemented only later.
The studies presented here investigate monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition and, in one case, adult second language acquisition. The languages studied are Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Sesotho, and Swedish.