The Acquisition of Word Order and ItsConstraints in Kaqchikel: A Preliminary Study

The acquisition of word order has been one of the central issues in the study of child language, and a matter of considerable interest with regard to this issue has been an example of languages characterized by relatively free ordering of constituents. These languages raised the question of whether children have access to all the permitted orders from the earliest observable stages, and also the question of whether children are sensitive to the constraints on the use of various orders. For example, in the acquisition of Japanese, a free word-order language that allows both the SOV order as in (1a) and the scrambled OSV order as in (1b), it has been observed at least since Hayashibe (1975) that even five-year-old Japanese-speaking children tend to misinterpret OSV sentences, by taking the first NP as the Agent of the action denoted by the verb, and the second NP as the Theme.