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Verb inflections in German child language: acquisition of agreement markings and the functions they encode

The paper deals with the emergence of coding devices for grammatical relations in German child language. In German there is some interaction between different sorts of surface-structure markings, such as word order, case endings, and agreement suffixes. The study focuses on the question of how children discover the (subject-verb) agreement system of German in relation to the other coding devices available in that language. It is shown that verb inflections are used quite early in children's language, without, however, encoding grammatical relations. In the early developmental phases, verb inflections are used rather to characterize specific subsets of argument structures in terms of their degree of transitivity. The second claim deals with the way agreement markings are integrated into the children's grammar in the subsequent developmental phases. It is argued that this process can be explained in terms of the universal principles of Slobin's theory of language acquisition. However, a few revisions and adjustments of Slobin's theory are necessary in order to account for the German data. For this purpose I will make use of generative approaches to learnability theory.