ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the acquisition of verb placement in Swiss German and is based on data spontaneously produced by two children as they acquire the Lucernese variant of Swiss German. Swiss German, like German, is a Verb-Second (V2) language which generally displays the verb-final pattern in embedded clauses. The consensus in the literature is that children master verb placement early in their linguistic development, and accordingly the parameter regulating verb placement is set very early. The data presented here conflict strongly with this widely held view: the striking fact about these data is that both children move the verb in any type of embedded clause, even in the presence of a complementizer, leading to a large number of verb placements which are not compatible with the adult grammar. The chapter describes the general verb-placement patterns in Swiss German, which basically coincide with those in German.
