HA-bortfall hos barn med svenska som L1 och L2

The grammar of Swedish and more or less all of its dialects contain the typologically rare feature auxiliary omission, where forms of the temporal auxiliary ha ‘have’ may be left unexpressed in subordinate clauses. There are reasons to believe that the feature is hard to acquire (e.g. in light of processability theory), but there seem to be no previous studies of L1 or L2 acquisition of Swedish auxiliary omission what so ever. In this article, the first empirical study of its kind is presented on how auxiliary omission is acquired and used among Swedish-speaking children, with an emphasis on children in primary and middle school (roughly between 9 and 13 years of age). Auxiliary omission seems to be especially hard for children taking the school subject Swedish as a second language, as they leave the temporal auxiliary out in main clauses as well. The result might suggest that auxiliary omission belongs to a kind of syntactic patterns that are especially sensitive to age effects, and hence particularly demanding for children with a relatively late age of onset in the acquisition of Swedish.