Economy and word order patterns in bilingual English-Dutch acquisition

The present study researches on bilingual acquisition of syntax; without there being necessarily a qualitative difference between monolingual and bilingual acquisition, the acquisition of more than one language in early childhood can shed light on the mechanisms driven by the language faculty. In particular, the hypothesis has been put forward that economy principles are operative in the process of acquisition (Platzack 1996, Zuckermann 1999), as much as in adult grammar. This hypothesis will be considered in relation to the acquisition of word order patterns by a Dutch-English 4-year-old. I develop the hypothesis presented in Gavarró 1998 that word order may be affected by a second language as part of the input the child is exposed to if the second language presents the default setting of the functional categories that trigger the application of Attract. The spontaneous productions of our bilingual child display verb-final embedded clauses in English, but no embedded clauses with an English-like raised verb in Dutch. The existence of a default option in acquisition preventing the application of Move is thus given empirical support. This paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 presents the background, both empirical and theoretical, to this study. Section 2 describes our original data and analyses it in a minimalist framework. Section 3 shows how the analysis proposed extends to much of the data in the literature.