Finiteness Matters

This paper reports a case study of Mandarin-Norwegian bilingual boy born into a Mandarin-speaking immigrant family in Norway. Mandarin and Norwegian are typologically distinct languages and presumably have contradictory parameters in the domains of finiteness and word order, the focal areas of the present study. The study explores whether there is cross-linguistic influence in the domains of finiteness and word order, leading the Mandarin-Norwegian bilingual child to lengthy periods of ungrammat