University of Groningen The acquisition of "optional" movement Zuckerman, Shalom IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 2001 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Zuckerman, S. (2001). The acquisition of "optional" movement. s.n. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum. Download date: 26-09-2021 PART II Chapter 4 The acquisition of embedded auxiliary-participle structures in Dutch 1. Introduction This chapter focuses on word-order variation in past-participle structures in embedded clauses of standard Dutch. Since the main question of this work is how children handle such cases of variation in their target grammar, these structures will be used as a test case for the acquisition of “optional” movement in Dutch. Recall that the main proposal in this work is that in the presence of “optional” movement in the input, a child will prefer to produce the more economical structure. To examine this proposal with respect to the case of embedded participle-structures in Dutch, one should first establish the properties of these structures, namely, the underlying structure and the movement operation(s) responsible for the two variants. Most importantly, one should clarify which of the two variants is the more economical (i.e., involves fewer movement operations) and thus the one expected to be preferred by children. Furthermore, one should investigate the adult speakers’ preferences; especially those that can be taken as representative tokens of the input the children receive, in order to compare them to the preferences of the children. Based on such a comparison of children’s and adults’ preferences, it will be claimed that, as predicted by the main proposal of this work, children do indeed prefer the more economical of two structures appearing in their input, while adults show a clear preference for the other option. Along the way, several aspects of the theoretical analysis of embedded participle structures in Dutch and their apparent optionality will be discussed. This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, the theoretical properties of the structures will be examined, in order to investigate the nature of the variation (i.e., is it truly optional?) and of the underlying structures (i.e., which order is the more economical?). In the second part, an experimental investigation that compares the production of children and adults will be presented. 62 Chapter 4 1.1 Variation in the target grammar Standard Dutch allows syntactic variation in the order of the verbal elements in the VP. This is demonstrated below: (1) a. dat Jan het boek heeft gelezen (the aux-part order) that Jan the book have read(participle) b. dat Jan het boek gelezen heeft (the part-aux order) that Jan the book read(part.) have ‘…that Jan read the book’ (2) a. dat Jan het boek wil lezen that Jan the book want read(inf) b. dat Jan het boek lezen wil that Jan the book read(inf) want ‘… that Jan wants to read the book’ Unlike Dutch, other Germanic languages, like, for example, German, do not allow such variation: (3) a. dass Jan das Buch gelesen hat that Jan the book read(part.) has b. * dass Jan das Buch hat gelesen The current paper focuses only on the auxiliary-participle structure, as in (1) above, and only occasionally will a remark be made about the other constructions. The structures in (2), which combine a modal verb and an infinitive, seem to be similar to the auxiliary-participle structures. However, in practice, Dutch speakers use the modal-infinitive order (2a) almost exclusively; thus, this structure does not qualify as the kind of optionality in the input that is of interest in the current work. In the introduction we considered the possibility that true optionality does not exist, and that at least a subtle difference exists between the interpretations assigned to Auxiliary-Participle in Dutch 63 any two structures that differ in word-order. In this respect, the auxiliary-participle structures in Dutch embedded clauses seem to be a hard nut to crack. Of all the seemingly optional structures mentioned in this work, this one seems closest to being truly optional. Speakers judge both orders as equally grammatical and there seems to be no difference in respect to register or so-called ‘stylistic’ measures. Nevertheless, in the following subsection, we shall see that even in this case there are differences between the two orders that cast doubt on their being truly optional. 1.2 The nature of the variation Current speakers of standard Dutch consider the two options in (1a-b) to be totally interchangeable. That is, when presented with the two variants most speakers will say that they see no difference with respect to grammaticality nor with respect to the interpretation assigned to the two options. This section discusses the nature of the variation and asks whether the aux-part and the part-aux orders are indeed equivalent. The question of the equivalence of the two orders will be discussed on syntactic level (grammaticality judgements), as well as the level of register and dialectal influence. In addition, the two orders will be evaluated with respect to the personal preferences of each speaker; that is, even though speakers judge both orders to be identical, it will be asked whether they demonstrate this judgement in their own use of the language. Below are several examples of proposed constraints on the aux-part/part-aux choice that have been proposed in the literature. 1.2.1 Syntactic constraints: Ron Van Zonneveld (personal communication) observes that when the verb-cluster is nominalized, the part-aux order becomes obligatory16, as shown in (4) below. (4) a. Het gelezen hebben van dit boek the read(part.) have of this book b. * Het hebben gelezen van dit boek 16 Ger de Haan (p.c.) points out that the contrast in (4) does not hold when the object is indefinite. That is, when the object dit boek ‘this book’ is replaced with veel boeken ‘a lot of books’ both 4a and 4b are acceptable. This observation calls for a fine graining of the relation between nominalization and movement in this construction, but nevertheless it does not diminish the argument made here, namely that in some contexts the optionality disappears. The fact that contrasts such as in (4) exist, casts a doubt on the claim that the relevant movement is optional. 64 Chapter 4 the have read(part.) of this book ‘The reading of this book’ The fact that an optional order becomes obligatory under nominalization is not unique to this case. Dative alternation in English that is optional in a matrix clause is forbidden under nominalization (see e.g. Baker 1997), and Wh-elements in French allowed both in-situ and in the fronted position are obligatorily in-situ under nominalization. This point will be elaborated later, when the underlying structure of the auxiliary-participle constructions is discussed. The important point here is that, in the context of nominalization, the apparent optionality disappears. When an auxiliary-participle construction includes a negation element (niet) or an affirmation (empathic) element (wel), speakers seem to prefer the part-aux order. However, when the sentence is neutral (without negation or affirmation), the aux- part order is preferred. This finding emerged from a translation experiment (reported in Zuckerman 1999) in which 141 Dutch-speaking students were asked to translate, from English into Dutch, a text that included 5 sentences of the discussed structures (In English, these structures are of an obligatory order and thus the translator is free to choose either of the two orders for the Dutch sentences). The results showed that while 65% of the neutral sentences were translated as aux-part structures, the sentences with negation or affirmation elements had only 35% and 41%, respectively, of that order and 65% and 59%, respectively, of the part-aux structure. Although these findings show that the presence of a negation or affirmation element creates only a change in preference and not in grammaticality judgement, the fact that such a syntactic element has an effect on people‘s preferences shows that the alternation in the auxiliary participle structure might be related to syntactic factors and is thus not truly free. Pardoen (1991) observes that sentences with the adverb vrijwel ‘nearly’ score poorly with the aux-part order (see (5a)), while with the part-aux order they are perfectly grammatical: (5) a. ? Omdat de legers elkaar vrijwel hebben afgeslacht (aux-part) because the armies each-other nearly have slaughtered b. Omdat de legers elkaar vrijwel afgeslacht hebben (part-aux) ‘Because the armies have nearly slaughtered each-other’ Auxiliary-Participle in Dutch 65 Adverbs such as vrijwel can be seen as scalar-degree relatives that carry a semantic function similar to the function of negation and affirmation markers.