The development of basic word order in child Emirati Arabic

Abstract

Emirati Arabic alternates between subject-verb (SV) and verb-subject (VS) basic word order, challenging acquisition theories to explain how children master both orders. We address this question by studying a 2-year corpus of 6 Emirati children (1.8–5.9) and child-directed speech, exploring the role that input frequency, verb transitivity, subject definiteness and animacy, and discourse function play in determining children’s choice of word order. Children first over-produce SV orders, confirming an early subject-first bias. VS orders appear earliest with intransitive and mono-transitive verbs whose subjects are new or inferable, tying word order to information status from the outset. By 4.6, children reserve VS for the same discourse roles as adults, including narrative event lines and minimal wh-answers but underexploit it in pragmatically neutral contexts. These findings support a hybrid model: an initial structural bias guides production, statistical learning aligns global frequencies, and discourse-pragmatic mappings fine-tune usage. SV/VS development in Emirati Arabic thus bolsters interface-based theories of grammatical growth.