Norwegian child language and the history of English

In this paper, data from a study investigating the acquisition of verb second (V2) word order in a dialect of Norwegian which allows two different word orders in wh-questions (V2 and V3) are used to argue for a cue-based approach to language acquisition and change (Lightfoot 1999). More specifically, it is shown that certain word order patterns that are dependent on information structure are acquired extremely early, and that they appear in Norwegian child language even in constructions where there is no evidence for them in the input. Similar patterns are attested in Old and Middle English, where V2 and non-V2 structures co-exist in topicalizations. The paper argues that a change in the statistical frequencies in the input to children, brought about by patterns of information structure, could be (at least partly) responsible for the development from V2 to non-V2 word order in the history of English.