The sentence structure in 6(a) mirrors that which is plausible in Welsh
(6(b)), although, since the structures in both languages do not overlap exactly,
any ‘transfer’ effects would be contingent on the children, at this age, misin-
terpreting the initial inflected preposition as a verb:
6 (b) ‘S gynnon ni ddim halen
Have-us-no-salt
Inf. prep S Neg O
‘We have no salt’Such examples are not necessarily evidence of transfer, however, since
many of CP2’s examples are in fact V2 sentences with ellipsis of the 1st ele-
ment, which also appear in the mother’s speech to the child, e.g. ‘habt ihr
Salz?’ (Have-2pl you salt , Do you have (any) salt?). Additionally, there are
some instances of object omissions in the German input, for example ‘habt
ihr nicht’ (have-2pl you not – this you don’t have?). German has been classi-
fied as a topic-drop-language that allows the omission of a topicalized con-
stituent if it is syntactically licensed and pragmatically identifiable. This
might lead the child to believe that V1 is possible in German (cf. the data
analyzed in Müller et al., 2002). Moreover, there are very few instances in
spoken Welsh where the main verb is V1, since the most common word
order, as discussed earlier, is aux SVO. The exception to this is the verb bod
‘to be’, which is very complex in terms of the forms it takes and the corre-
sponding word order encoded, is the most used auxiliary (although tends to
be omitted in early child speech, even in monolinguals), as demonstrated in
the made up examples below:
7(a) ‘dw i’n athrawes (V1)
am(1st sg pres)-I + prt-teacher
V S predicate
‘I’m a teacher’ (indefinite)7( b) mae mam yma (V1)
Is(3rd sg pres)- mother-here
V S adv
‘mum’s here’7(c) oes ‘na feddyg yma? (V1)
is(3rd sg. pres)-there-doctor-here
V S adv
‘is there a doctor here?’ (existential)Although the data set analysed for this chapter is too small to identify
whether the word order violations produced by our bilinguals are systemic,
it remains the case that CP2 does not seem to have teased apart the word
60 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development