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A Grammer without Functional Categories: A Syntactic Study of Early Swedish Child Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Christer Platzack
Affiliation:
Institutionen för nordiska språ;k, Helgonabacken 14, S-223 62 Lund, Sweden
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Abstract

In this paper I give empirical evidence for the hypothesis that there are no functional categories in early Swedish child language (up to approximately 3 years of age). claiming that utterances with at least a subject and a verb at this early stage of language development can be described within the limits of VP. Several properties of early Swedish are shown to follow from this hypothesis, including the lack of subordinate clauses in early Swedish and the fact that early Swedish is not a verb second language.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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