Norwegian embedded clauses give children two options for subject placement: preceding or following negation (S-Neg/Neg-S). In the adult language, S-Neg is the ‘default’ and highly frequent option, and Neg-S is infrequent in children’s input. However, Neg-S may be argued to be the structurally less complex. We investigate whether children are aware of the existence of both subject positions, and if they prefer the more frequent or the less complex position. Through an elicited production task with monolingual Norwegian children (N=33, age 3;1-6;1) we find that children in general overuse the Neg-S option, and we suggest that children have an inherent preference for the less complex position, due to a principle of structural economy. We also find that a group of children display U-shaped development, first using only S-Neg, then only Neg-S and finally S-Neg again, and we relate this to structure building and economy of movement.

OV/VO variation in the history of English has been a long-debated issue. Where earlier approaches were concerned with the grammatical status of the variation (see van Kemenade 1987; Pintzuk 1999 and many others), the debate has shifted more recently to explaining the variation from a pragmatic perspective (see Bech 2001; Taylor & Pintzuk 2012a), focusing on the given-before-new hypothesis (Gundel 1988) and its consequences for OV/VO. While the work by Taylor & Pintzuk (2012a) focuses specifically on the newness of VO orders, the present study is particularly concerned with the givenness of OV word order. It is hypothesized that OV orders are the result of leftward movement from VO orders, triggered by givenness. A corpus study on a database of subclauses with two verbs and a direct object, collected from the YCOE (Taylor et al.2003) corpus, and subsequent multinomial regression analysis within a generalized linear mixed model shows that OV word order is reserved for given objects, while VO objects are much more mixed in terms of information structure. We argue that these results are more in line with an analysis which derives all occurring word orders from a VO base than an analysis which proposes the opposite.

In English, the position of the AP in the nominal phrase is determined by its form: only structurally simpler phrases are said to be licit in prenominal position, more complex ones have to follow the noun. Recent studies have reported an increasing use of nominal premodifiers in English, so the question arises whether this trend affects only simpler phrases or whether a new structural option emerges – complex APs in prenominal position. Drawing on data from COHA, this article investigates which types of AP occur prenominally. The data show that certain types of complex APs are gaining ground in the prenominal position. Most of these can be analyzed as complex words rather than complex phrases and hence do not indicate major syntactic changes in the English NP. However, some of the attestations, such as easy-predicates with a to-infinitival clause, are complex phrases. It is argued that it is the dependency relation between their rightmost element, a lexical verb, and the noun they modify which makes them occur in prenominal position.