EMBEDDED V-TO-C IN CHILD GRAMMAR: THE ACQUISITION OF VERB PLACEMENT IN SWISS GERMAN. Manuela Schönenberger. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. xx + 410. $150.00 cloth.

Extract

This book examines the acquisition of verb placement in Swiss German. In Swiss German, as in the case of German and other verb-second languages, the finite verb occurs in the second position (i.e., C position) in matrix clauses but in the final position in embedded clauses, although verb movement in certain embedded contexts such as complements of bridge verbs and indirect questions is optionally permitted. The child Swiss-German data, collected by the author, come primarily from two children—Moira (age: 3;10–6;01) and Eliza (age: 3;10—6;01)—who were acquiring the Lucerne variant of Swiss German. A positive aspect of this research is that it is based on a vast amount of spontaneous production data gathered longitudinally as well as on elicited data. These data are supplemented by data elicited experimentally from Moira's peers in her kindergarten class in Lucerne. A significant finding of Schönenberger's research is that children acquiring the Lucernese variant of Swiss German make a high number of verb placement errors in embedded clauses, in striking contrast to what has been observed in the case of children acquiring German. Specifically, the two children in Schönenberger's study move the finite verb in any type of embedded clause even when there is an overt complementizer present in these clauses. Although the embedded clauses produced by the Lucernese children do not match those in the adult grammar, Schönenberger argues convincingly that their underlying grammar is only minimally different from that of the adult grammar.