Acquisition of German Relative Clauses

2 This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2;0 to 5;0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only little different from simple sentences: They contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information, and often occur with main clause word order. In the course of the development, more complex relative constructions emerge, in which the relative clause is embedded in a full-fledged main clause. We argue that German relative clauses develop in an incremental fashion from simple non-embedded sentences that gradually evolve into complex sentence constructions