Abstract
There is an ongoing linguistic debate as to whether or not the V2 effect in German main clauses results from movement of verbs into a head-initial C-head position (see Travis, 1984; Grewendorf, 1988; Vikner and Schwartz, 1991; Reis and Rosengren, 1991). In this paper, we shall link this question to a range of data from child language. We will argue that there are good reasons for doubting that children’s early V2 main clauses should be analyzed as CPs and - even more heretically - we will propose that V2 clauses never need to be reanalyzed as CPs on their way to the adult system.
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Gawlitzek-Maiwald, L., Tracy, R., Fritzenschaft, A. (1992). Language Acquisition and Competing Linguistic Representations: The Child as Arbiter. In: Meisel, J.M. (eds) The Acquisition of Verb Placement. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2803-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2803-2_6
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