Second Language Research 17,4 (2001); pp.

345367

The theoretical significance of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition

Roger Hawkins University of Essex

The evidence that native language acquisition is possible only because children are born with an innately- determined language faculty Universal Grammar is considerable. The evidence that the same innate ability is involved in second language acquisition (SLA) by older learners is superficially less clear. There are differences both in the context of acquisition and the nature of development. One recent approach suggests that only poverty of the stimulus phenomena where neither the first language (L1) nor the second language (L2) are possible sources for L2 representations can provide incontrovertible evidence for Universal Grammar (UG) in SLA. I argue that while poverty of the stimulus phenomena are important landmarks in theory development in SLA research, they are not the most compelling reason for assuming the involvement of UG. More compelling are attempts to explain L2L1 differences. The latter are likely to lead to real progress, not only in understanding the nature of SLA but also the structure and organization of the language faculty itself.

I Introduction The context in which second language acquisition (SLA) occurs differs from first language acquisition (FLA) along a number of dimensions: 1) In SLA another language is already present. 2) Other components of mind have already matured, whereas arguably FLA and the development of other cognitive capacities go hand in hand. 3) Input is usually encountered differently, and may involve written as well as spoken language. The contextual differences inevitably give rise to differences in the course of development of L2 grammars. The issue to be addressed in this article is why, despite the differences between second and
Address for correspondence: Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, UK; email roghawk@essex.ac.uk Arnold 2001 0267-6583(01)SR189OA

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first language acquisition, much of the work in the mentalist tradition initiated in studies like those of Corder (1967), Selinker (1972) and Dulay et al. (1982) would assume that Universal Grammar (UG) is inextricably involved, even in SLA which takes place beyond adolescence. One reason, which has stimulated considerable recent work, is poverty of the stimulus (POS) phenomena. These are cases where there is evidence for L2 grammatical representations which are derivable neither from properties of the speakers first language (L1) nor deducible from input. Some theorists have suggested that only POS phenomena can provide incontrovertible evidence for the presence of UG in the grammars of L2 speakers (Dekydtspotter et al., 1997; Dekydtspotter and Sprouse, 2000; Schwartz and Sprouse, 2000). I argue that while POS phenomena are important for establishing the UG-constrained nature of L2 mental representations, they are not the most compelling reason for its involvement. The reason is that establishing that the epistemological space (to borrow a term from a reviewer) within which L2 representations are constructed is defined by UG does little to advance our understanding either of SLA itself, or of UG more generally. A more compelling reason, I suggest, comes from the hypotheses that result from attempts to explain L2L1 differences from a UG perspective. (I take the explanation of L2L1 differences to have been a central goal of the earliest generative work on SLA.) Such hypotheses represent real progress in understanding the nature of SLA and may even shed light on the structure and organization of the innate language faculty. The article is organized as follows. In Section II there is a brief history of how the field arrived at a position where POS phenomena are seen as the only source of incontrovertible evidence for Universal Grammar in SLA. Section III discusses the limitations of POS studies, and argues that difference-oriented approaches offer the potential for advancing understanding of both SLA and UG. II Universal Grammar and the significance of L2L1 differences One definition of UG runs along the following lines: UG is the system of principles and computational procedures which define and place limits on the form that grammars for human languages can take. A grammar for a particular language is the set of procedures (traditionally called rules) which generate all and only the grammatical sentences of that language, with appropriate

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Roger Hawkins 347 specifications for their sound structure and meaning.1 By hypothesis, UG is independent of the specific grammars that individuals (unconsciously) construct on contact with samples of language (the primary linguistic data). Also by hypothesis, the principles and computational procedures of UG are specific to the language faculty and are genetically determined. These genetically determined principles and procedures constrain the form that particular grammars can take so tightly that acquisition by L1 learners proceeds uniformly, rapidly and with full success (under normal conditions).2 Where parameter values need to be fixed in the course of development, these are resolvable from easily detectable properties of the input. In early studies which seriously investigated whether this genetically-determined language faculty is involved in (postchildhood) SLA, observable developmental differences between L2 and L1 learners played a central role. Such differences include the influence exerted by the L1 at the onset of acquisition and in subsequent development, and apparent fossilization of L2 behaviour in some areas in some learners prior to the achievement of full target-like behaviour (among other differences; nine differences between the two types of language learners are listed by Bley-Vroman, 1989: 4349). The differences led some researchers at various times to the conclusion that UG is not involved at all in the construction of L2 mental grammars by older learners, so that SLA is fundamentally different from FLA (Felix, 1985; Clahsen and Muysken, 1986; BleyVroman, 1989). A recent representative of this line of thinking is Newmeyer (1998: 74) who, on the basis of the differences, suggests that the null hypothesis, surely, is that adult-acquired L2s are not systems of grammatical competence. Interestingly, he uses this position as an argument to strengthen the claim that native grammars are autonomous representational systems, separate from
It is important to stress that grammatical is not the same thing as sensible or interpretable. As a reviewer points out, this has been emphasized in generative work since its inception. Grammatically well-formed sentences may make little sense (e.g., Bachelors are married women) and perfectly interpretable sentences may be ungrammatical (e.g., There seemed someone to be in the room). 2 A reviewer suggests that rapidity in FLA is not an argument per se that development is UG constrained; speed has more to do with fast neural growth in the first year of life, processing windows, etc. However, given the range of possible hypotheses about language that a child could entertain, only a theory proposing some version of an innate UG would seem to predict the speed at which development in fact occurs (i.e., apparent acquisition of all the major structural properties of a language between 31/2 and 5 years). This feat is even more remarkable if not all of the neural connections required for language are in place at birth, and if children have less space in working memory than adults, as some have proposed (e.g., Crain and Lillo-Martin, 1999: 27).
1

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the cognitive mechanisms responsible for language use. If UG is subject to a critical period so that speakers cannot construct UGconstrained representations beyond a certain age then native grammars must be distinct from the mechanisms of language use, because mechanisms of language use continue to be available throughout life. Older L2 learners can use their knowledge of the L2, but that knowledge is derived from other cognitive abilities and, hence, is fundamentally different from that of native speakers. For those who maintained, unlike Newmeyer, that the grammars of adult L2 learners are, indeed, systems of grammatical competence derived from the interaction between UG and primary data, the differences between SLA and FLA acquisition were a major explanatory challenge. This challenge appears to have been very much to the fore in early generative work on SLA. For example, one of the problems addressed in a study of the development of knowledge of preposition stranding in the L2 English of Dutch speakers reported by van Buren and Sharwood Smith (1985: 19) was the extent to which the learners knowledge of UG contribute[s] to the acquisition process in SLA, where the issue was how the properties of the L1 and the constraints of UG interact to produce L2-specific representations. In the same (first) issue of Second Language Research, White discusses the possibility that, as the result of the transfer of L1 parameter settings, the principles of UG do not work in identical fashion in L1 and L2 (1985: 1). The refutation by du Plessis et al. (1987) of Clahsen and Muyskens (1986) fundamental difference account of the SLA of German word order was centrally concerned with how adult L2 and child L1 developmental differences could be captured in UGderived L2 grammars. Eubanks (1994) theory of valueless features is a UG-based attempt to explain why L2 initial-state grammars might differ from L1 initial-state grammars, as is Vainikka and Young-Scholtens minimal trees theory (1994; 1996; 1998). Although many of these accounts explicitly defend the claim that UG is fully available to (post-childhood) L2 learners, I will refer to them as difference-oriented, because they attempt to explain why there might be observable differences between child L1 learners and adult L2 learners on the basis of how UG, the L1, primary data and perhaps other factors interact. The simple dichotomy of the access to UG question addressed in work of the 1980s and early 1990s is it available to adult L2 learners or not? which forced researchers to give some account of L2L1 differences, has been superseded in more recent work by the idea that if it can be shown that L2 representations fall within

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Roger Hawkins 349 the epistemological space defined by UG, then whether or not L2 and L1 speakers have the same representations for a particular target language is irrelevant. What is important is whether those representations are constrained by the principles and properties allowed by UG (Dekydtspotter et al., 1998). That is, work should aim to determine whether or not L2 mental representations meet the criterion of being UG-derived (Epstein et al., 1996; Dekydtspotter and Sprouse, 2000; Schwartz and Sprouse, 2000). By implication, L2L1 differences are no longer central. This work has inevitably focused on POS phenomena where L2 grammatical representations are underdetermined both by the L1 and by the L2 input as the ideal case within which to test such a hypothesis. To illustrate, consider the well-known study by Martohardjono (1993) of locality constraints on wh-phrase movement in L2 grammars (also reported in Epstein et al., 1996). The locality constraints imposed by UG have as a consequence that sentences like the following are more or less ungrammatical for native speakers of English (examples from Epstein et al., 1996):
1) a. * Which mayor did Mary read [the book that praised ___]? (Movement out of a relative clause) b. * Which soup did the man leave the table [after the waiter spilled ___]? (Movement out of an adjunct) 2) a. ? Which patient did Max explain [how the poison killed ___]? (Movement out of a wh-island) b. ? Which car did John spread [the rumour that the neighbour stole ___]? (Movement out of a noun complement)

In early studies of the accessibility of these locality constraints to L2 speakers of English whose L1s do not have overt wh-movement in questions (and, hence, in whose L1s the issue of how far whconstituents can move overtly is not raised), the focus was on whether or not speakers displayed target-like intuitions about these ungrammatical cases. In other words, the criterion for determining whether L2 grammars are UG-derived was an absolute one: if UG constrains the operation of wh-phrase movement in L2 grammars, then speakers should respond in the same way as native speakers. Typically it was found that older L2 speakers did not respond in the same way as native speakers unless their L1s had movement like English. This led to claims that adult L2 speakers at best have

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partial access to this area of UG (Bley-Vroman et al., 1988; Schachter, 1990; Johnson and Newport, 1991). Martohardjono (1993) argued that the absolute criterion is too strict. Assuming the model of UG proposed in Chomsky (1986), examples like (1) and (2) display different types of locality constraints. The violations illustrated in (1) (extraction from nonargument positions) lead to strong ungrammaticality, while the violations in (2) (extraction from argument positions) lead to weak ungrammaticality. If L2 speakers intuitions about the relative strength of ungrammaticality are investigated, it turns out that those who are sufficiently advanced to have acquired grammatical whphrase movement make significant distinctions between the two types. In a study of L1 speakers of Chinese, Indonesian and Italian who were deemed to be advanced learners of English, Martohardjono found that on a grammaticality-judgement task all of the groups were making significant distinctions between the strong and weak violations, even though only the Italian speakers were performing in absolute terms like the native English-speaking controls (see Table 1). The inference that Epstein et al. (1996: 688) draw from these results is that although L2 learners may lag behind native speakers with regard to accuracy rates, their judgements of wh-structures may still derive from their knowledge of UG principles. The explanation for the differences between the groups lies not in whether their grammatical representations are different, but in factors inherent in the experimental task. As Martohardjono (1998: 155) more recently puts it we would expect various extragrammatical factors to intervene in this, as in any other type of task, with the result of depressing L2 learners accuracy rates vis-vis native speaker rates.3
Table 1 Relative rejection rates of strong and weak constraints on movement in English by speakers of different L1s Language group English controls Italian Indonesian Chinese Strong violations (%) 99 91 88 75 Weak violations (%) 78 62 46 44

Source: based on Martohardjono, 1993.

Usha Lakshmanan (personal communication) points out that it is possible with experimental sentences like Which patient did Max explain how the poison killed? that L2 speakers may be accepting them as cases of short wh-movement (e.g., where which patient has come from the indirect-object position of explain: Max explained (to) which patient how the poison killed). However, two pieces of evidence suggest that L2 informants are not in
3

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Roger Hawkins 351 A similar, but nevertheless different, type of POS argument that representation in L2 grammars falls within the epistemological space defined by UG can be found in Schwartz and Sprouse (2000). Their study addresses the question of how SLA research should respond to revisions in linguistic theory that affect specific SLA proposals based on earlier versions of the theory. (This is a question that had already been posed by van Buren and Sharwood Smith (1985: 21) as: When linguistics coughs, should second language acquisition studies catch pneumonia?) Schwartz and Sprouse argue that cases where L2 speakers construct an interlanguage representation which is found neither in the L1 nor the L2 but is found in one of the worlds languages are instances of POS and will remain instances of POS whatever the linguistic theory (since any theory will need to account for the fact that this property occurs in a natural language). One example comes from their own (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994) study of the acquisition of German word order by an L1 Turkish speaker, Cevdet. Turkish is a verbfinal language (both in main and embedded clauses) while German is a verb-second language (in main clauses). For a period of about one year Cevdets grammar for German allowed verb-second with pronominal subjects but not with non-pronominal subjects (examples from Schwartz and Sprouse, 2000: 172):
3) a. in der Trkei der Lehrer kann den Schler schlagen in the Turkey the teacher can the pupil beat In Turkey, the teacher can hit the pupil. b. dann trinken wir bis neun Uhr then drink we until nine oclock then we drink until nine oclock.

The property of subjectverb inversion with pronominal subjects alone whatever the appropriate linguistic explanation for it is found neither in Turkish nor in German. Crucially, however, it is found in other languages; it is found in French, for example, where in questions it is possible to invert pronominal subjects and verbs, but not non-pronominal subjects:

fact doing this. First, Johnson and Newport (1991), in a study discussed in Section III of the present article, conducted an interpretation task to test precisely this question and found no evidence that L2 speakers treated experimental sentences as cases of short wh-movement. Secondly, the fact that all of Martohardjonos groups differ in their judgements of violations of strong and weak constraints suggests that they are not treating experimental sentences as cases of short movement. If they did, they would not differ in their judgements on the two types.

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4) a. Le professeur bat-il ses lves? The teacher beats he his pupils Does the teacher hit his pupils? (*Bat le professeur ses lves?) b. Bat-il ses lves? Beats he his pupils? Does he hit his pupils?

This kind of POS is different from the POS observed in locality constraints on wh-phrase movement. In the case of locality constraints there is no positive evidence in the input bearing on the matter whatsoever. By contrast, in the case of subjectverb inversion Cevdet constructs a grammar by selecting a subset of the positive evidence he is presented with. German offers positive examples of verb-second both with pronominal and nonpronominal subjects. Cevdet has misrepresented these data by selecting only the cases of pronominal subjects for possible inversion, but he has done this in a way that is found in other extant natural languages. On this basis, Schwartz and Sprouse (2000: 175) conclude that regardless of the precise formulation of syntactic theory, Cevdets Interlanguage behaviour can be accounted for only by assuming that his Interlanguage hypotheses are guided by UG. Let me refer to studies like these as POS-oriented accounts of how UG constrains grammatical representations in SLA, to distinguish them from the difference-oriented accounts of access to UG described earlier. The shift in the research agenda from difference-oriented to POS-oriented approaches is understandable. First, despite an assumption in the early difference-oriented studies that L2L1 differences only affect initial-state and transitional-state grammars and are temporary, it was nevertheless observed that there are properties that sometimes give rise to persistent L2L1 differences. This is unexpected if L2 grammars are UG-derived. Such was the finding, for example, in the early studies of locality constraints (Bley-Vroman et al., 1988; Schachter, 1990; Johnson and Newport, 1991). Secondly, the continuing appeal of the fundamental difference hypothesis among generative linguists not working on SLA (like Newmeyer, for instance, who is probably among the group likely to be the bestinformed about SLA research) obviously called for more vigorous defence of UG involvement in post-childhood SLA. Thirdly, shifts in linguistic theory that undermine specific difference-oriented proposals for L2 phenomena are troublesome, as Schwartz and Sprouse (2000) point out. However, while the concentration of research effort on POS phenomena appears to provide a strategy for countering claims that

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Roger Hawkins 353 SLA is fundamentally different from FLA, and for avoiding difficult issues of how acquisition research handles changes in theories of UG, it is problematic in other ways. It obviously does not, of itself, offer an account of how SLA differs specifically from FLA. In that respect it does not go beyond offering glimpses of UG in SLA. Once it is accepted that UG is involved, a POS approach offers nothing else. Moreover, it probably cannot contribute to our understanding of UG, since the rationale of the approach is to find phenomena that already exist in mature native grammars. For these reasons, while POS-oriented studies are invaluable for providing evidence that post-childhood L2 grammars are UG-derived hence represent an important stage in theory development in SLA research they may not offer the most compelling reason why SLA research should assume that L2 grammars are the product of the innate language faculty.4 In Section III, I argue that differenceoriented research, which was central in early generative approaches, offers a more compelling reason for UG-based research. III UG, SLA and explanation POS-oriented studies of locality like Martohardjonos described above (and related studies: Uziel, 1993; Li, 1998; White and Juffs, 1998) are interested in the relative sensitivity of L2 learners to strong and weak locality violations. All the cited studies find such relative sensitivity, clearly suggesting that L2 learners mental representations are UG-derived, and all also find differences in levels of accuracy between nonnative and native informants. The question is: Beyond showing that UG can be glimpsed in the kinds of representations that L2 learners construct, does this sort of POS study advance our understanding of (1) UG; (2) SLA? The answer appears to be no in both cases. The operation of the locality
4

A reviewer questions whether the strong UG hypothesis can be assumed on the basis of existing evidence, and suggests that a function of POS-oriented studies is to provide such evidence in a more direct and potentially convincing fashion than was available in difference-oriented studies of the 1980s and early 1990s. This implies that there is some point at which sheer weight of evidence will tip the balance in favour of the argument that L2 representations are UG-derived. My own view currently is that it is unlikely that such a persuasion point will ever be reached, given the complexity of SLA data and the number of variables involved, and that assuming the UG hypothesis is more an act of faith than evidence-supported persuasion. Undoubtedly, studies that demonstrate that there are POS phenomena in SLA strengthen the credo of such an act of faith. The point that is made in Section III is that if for the purposes of theory construction and in the pursuit of research questions the decision is taken that L2 representations are UG-derived, at that point the investigation of POS phenomena per se offers no more insight than the comparative investigation of mature native grammars.

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354 The theoretical significance of UG in SLA constraints is by hypothesis the same in both native and nonnative grammars. If we wish to deepen understanding of how principles of UG interact with language-specific properties in such cases we would do better to look at native grammars, where results from performance tests are subject to fewer variables and are much clearer. This kind of POS-oriented study also makes L2L1 differences of peripheral interest: L2 learners lag behind natives because they have not had the same amount of time to establish a target-like lexicon or target-like processing routines, or they may be suffering from a production problem of unspecified nature (Epstein et al., 1996: 688 and 706). So it tells us nothing about SLA; only investigation of how input affects development or how performance interacts with competence would tell us about SLA, and there has been an absence of detailed proposals about these matters in the literature. In the case of Schwartz and Sprouses proposal a similar problem arises. Although they describe a different kind of POS phenomenon, where L2 speakers misrepresent positive evidence in a way which produces a grammar consistent neither with the L1 nor the L2, but with a third naturally-occurring language, their account does not advance our understanding of UG. Crucially for them, the interlanguage representation constructed must be mirrored in at least one natural language grammar (2000: 175). Given this requirement, research might as well focus on the comparative syntax of native grammars, since no property will emerge in POS-oriented studies of SLA that cannot be found in naturally occurring native grammars. Again such properties are clearer in native grammars than in L2 grammars.5 In terms of furthering explanation in the field of SLA itself, Schwartz and Sprouse offer a potential account of transfer which could at least take forward understanding of initial-state L2 grammars. They suggest that, with respect to a given linguistic feature, research should compare the developmental paths of L2 speakers of typologically different L1s. If there is divergent development, then this constitutes evidence for transfer; if there is uniform development, then this would constitute evidence against
5

A reviewer points out that Schwartz and Sprouse make no claim that SLA research in its current state can contribute to the development of the theory of UG. The argument is that theoretical linguists generally have not been convinced that L2 grammars are UGconstrained, and until they are (by POS-oriented studies of SLA) it is unrealistic to expect SLA research to make any contribution to the development of UG theory. This suggests that at some future point POS-oriented studies may contribute to the development of UG theory. The argument in the text, however, is that POS-oriented studies, by their nature, have no greater potential for offering insight into UG than the comparative investigation of mature native grammars, a domain in which the data are much clearer than they are in SLA.

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Roger Hawkins 355 transfer. (For earlier proposals along similar lines, see Zobl, 1980; 1982.) While true, it does not help us understand which features are likely to be affected (because, as we know from the many studies of development undertaken since the 1970s, not all features are subject to L1 influence) nor why just these features and not others should be affected. In contrast to studies that seek out evidence for the fundamental identity of L2 and native grammars, consider the potential impact on our understanding both of SLA and UG of trying to explain the differences found between SLA and FLA. Several views of the extent of UG involvement are compatible with difference-oriented approaches. If a full access to UG position is adopted, then the task is to begin constructing a theory of performance (if differences result from production problems) or a theory of the interaction of input and acquisition (if differences are the effect of L2 speakers lagging behind natives). This raises direct questions about the nature of the interface between (components of) UG and other modules of mind. Full access accounts must do this because if it is accepted that UG is available in the same form in SLA and FLA the differences between them could only arise at the interface between UG-derived grammars and other mental systems. (For a recent and innovatory attempt to construct a theory of the interaction between input and acquisition see Carroll, 1999; 2000.) In this case results will not only produce testable proposals about why and how SLA is different from FLA, but also how UG relates to other components of mind. SLA would then provide a different kind of window on UG; that is, a view that is different from the study of native grammars, from FLA and from studies of disordered language. SLA research would make a contribution to the development of the theory of UG, rather than seeking out clones of constructs found elsewhere. Alternatively, suppose that difference-oriented studies adopt the view that UG itself ceases to operate in precisely the same way as it does in childhood. The interactions between UG and other modules of mind remain constant (so that SLA research will not necessarily contribute anything to the understanding of interface relations). It then becomes of interest to ask whether the changes can be linked to identifiable components of UG. If this turned out to be the case, it would not only produce testable proposals about how SLA differs from FLA, but also about what might count as a discrete module in UG. Since this is a line of research that I believe offers considerable promise, I will illustrate in slightly more detail with two examples. (Whether UG is assumed to be fully available or not, the point remains the same that it is difference-oriented

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studies which are likely to be more fruitful in deepening understanding than POS-oriented studies.) Consider again the case of locality constraints. In POS-oriented accounts differences between nonnative and native grammars are recognized, but are attributed to performance or production factors. However, it is clear that the differences are L1-related. Martohardjonos results in Table 1 suggest that, although all learners make a distinction between weak and strong violations of locality constraints in English, the L1 speakers of Italian are closer to target norms than speakers of Indonesian or Chinese. A difference-oriented approach that assumes that UG has changed in some way must ask: What has changed to give rise to these effects? It cannot simply be a problem of resetting whatever parameter is involved in wh-phrase fronting in questions, because the learners in the study accepted grammatical questions involving wh-phrase fronting which were not violations of locality. Hence, in some sense they have reset a parameter. This forces us to look at other possibilities. In a related study of locality violations in the L2 English of Chinese speakers, Johnson and Newport (1991) incorporated alongside a grammaticality-judgement task an interpretation test. The results of this test have gone largely unnoticed in the subsequent literature. Seven native speakers of Chinese and 6 native speakers of English were presented with written sentences like (5a) and asked questions like (5b):
5) a. The policeman knew where the thief hid the jewels. b. What did the policeman know where the thief hid?

Observe that the question here weakly violates locality because an argument has been moved out of a wh-island. The test involved both weak and strong violations, and its purpose was to ensure that the Chinese speakers were not accepting violations in the grammaticality-judgement task because they were assigning such sentences different interpretations from native speakers. Informants responses were scored as correct (jewels would be the correct answer in this case), as other interpretation (if they gave some other response) or as dont know. Results are given in Table 2. While the results show that Chinese speakers are not assigning other interpretations to sentences which violate locality constraints to any significant degree (hence the difference between their judgements of grammaticality and those of native speakers cannot be attributed to the sentences meaning something different) they also show, surprisingly, that the Chinese speakers

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Roger Hawkins 357

Table 2 Mean responses of subjects interpreting wh-phrases on a locality violation comprehension task Extraction from N complement (weak violation) L1 Chinese English Chinese English Chinese English Correct 3.57 3.83 3.28 3.00 2.57 1.16 Other interpretretation 0.14 0.00 0.28 0.00 0.14 0.00 Dont know 0.28 0.16 0.43 1.00 1.28 2.83

wh-island (weak violation)

Relative clause (strong violation)

Note: The maximum potential correct score for the interpretation of each construction type is 4. Source: adapted from Johnson and Newport, 1991: 242.

are much better at interpreting strong violations than native speakers are. Strong violations are the result of moving nonarguments too far, whereas weak violations result from moving arguments too far. Roberts (1997) has suggested that locality violations involving arguments are awkward but interpretable, whereas violations involving nonarguments are difficult even to interpret. The results of the native controls in Table 2 are consistent with this claim. But the results of the Chinese speakers are not, suggesting that relative clauses do not have the same adjunct-like status for them as they do for native speakers. A similar kind of result from an interpretation task is reported in Li (1998). Li compared the performance of 180 L1 Chinesespeaking university students of English in China with 25 native English-speaking controls. The test required informants to read short stories of 4 or 5 sentences in length. They were then asked questions in which a wh-phrase could have been extracted from more than one position. For example, one story was about a boy who had forgotten his grandmothers birthday and who asked his mother if she would telephone his grandmother with him. Following the story informants were asked: Who did he ask ___ [to call ___]? where there are two possible responses: his mother (corresponding to the object gap after ask) and his grandmother (corresponding to the object gap after call). Some of these ambiguous questions involved ungrammatical wh-phrase extraction of arguments and nonarguments; for example:
6) a. Who did the boy ask a [how to help ?b ]? b. When did John know a [how to fix his bike *b ]?

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358 The theoretical significance of UG in SLA

Table 3 Informant responses to the interpretation of argument and adjunct whphrases (percentage; proportions in brackets) Sentence type: Who did the boy ask a [how to help ?b ]? L1 Chinese (n = 180) English (n = 25) Only a 51.9 (187/360) 56.0 (28/50) Both a and b 43.9 (158/360) 34.0 (17/50) Only b 1.7 (6/360) 8.0 (4/50)

Sentence type: When did John know a [how to fix his bike *b ]? L1 Chinese (n = 180) English (n = 25) Only a 59.4 (214/360) 78.0 (39/50) Both a and b 30.0 (108/360) 14.0 (7/50) Only b 5.8 (21/360) 2.0 (1/50)

Source: based on Li, 1998.

Since responses that informants can give to the questions are potentially ambiguous on the basis of the stories they have heard, examples like (6) involve a conflict between what is interpretively possible (both gaps) and what is syntactically possible (only the first gap gives rise to clear grammaticality). Li scored the results in terms of informants: acceptance of just the interpretation associated with the a gaps; acceptance of both interpretations a and b, and acceptance only of interpretation b. The results are given in Table 3. (There were two tokens involving possible weak violations and two tokens involving possible strong violations, hence the total potential number of responses for each interpretation is 360 for the Chinese informants and 50 for the native controls.) While both sets of informants are about equal in interpreting the b position as a possible target for the interpretation of the whphrase when a weak violation is involved, the Chinese speakers are better at interpreting this as a potential target when a strong violation is involved. Again, this suggests that the constructions in question may not have the same structural status for the nonnative speakers as for the natives: the Chinese speakers may not be interpreting them as extractions of nonarguments. At least two possibilities come to mind for explaining the difference. The first is that for Chinese speakers overt movement is not involved. Instead, wh-phrases are merged in a topic-like position either with TP or CP, and are co-interpreted with a null pronominal (rather than moving and binding a variable). This is an idea proposed in White (1992: 45758):

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Roger Hawkins 359

Instead of presuming that L2 learners have the same representation as native speakers of English (i.e. wh . . . t) . . ., we should consider other possible representations for such sentences consistent with their linguistic behaviour . . . I propose that, when they appear to accept subjacency violations, they analyse the English sentences as containing a base-generated wh-phrase, with a base-generated null resumptive pro in the gap.

Since Chinese does not have overt wh-phrase movement in questions, and it is standardly assumed that overt movement to the specifier position of functional categories is driven by uninterpretable features made available optionally by UG (compare Chomsky, 1998), the absence of moved wh-phrases in ChineseEnglish interlanguage could be attributed to the absence of feature-driven overt movement in Chinese. It might then be suggested that UG changes beyond childhood in such a way that access to optional uninterpretable features is lost unless they have been encoded in the L1. On this interpretation, SLA research would provide potential evidence to support the claim that there are optional uninterpretable features in UG. A second possibility is that the Chinese speakers English grammars involve a different kind of wh-phrase movement from syntactic feature-driven movement, namely scrambling. One view of scrambling is that it is optional movement involving reconstruction of the unmoved structure at LF (Saito and Fukui, 1998); it is, hence, not subject to syntactic locality constraints. The reason why Chinese speakers might adopt a scrambling representation for fronted wh-phrases in English would be the same: unavailability of the optional uninterpretable feature which drives syntactic wh-phrase movement. In both cases the fact that Chinese speakers do make distinctions between the acceptability of weak and strong locality violations would need to be the result of something other than feature-driven syntactic movement. There is, however, evidence that differences between weak and strong violations exist at the level of LF in Chinese, in that subjacency violations (weak violations) appear not to hold while Empty Category Principle violations (strong violations) do (see Huang, 1982). If LF is universally invariant, Chinese speakers would simply be carrying over interpretive possibilities that are hard-wired into UG, and judging English sentences accordingly. Observe that we have here testable proposals about SLA itself: that speakers of languages without overt wh-movement will not construct representations involving feature-driven movement, but will draw on other resources made available by UG for modelling

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fronted wh-phrases (merge and pronominal binding, or scrambling). This might lead us to investigate other cases of featuredriven movement verb raising, verb second, noun raising with a fresh eye. Where it appears, superficially, that L2 speakers whose L1s do not have feature-driven movement have acquired that property in the L2, is this really the case or are they using some other UG-derived operation? We also have possible evidence to support the idea that optional uninterpretable features form a natural subclass within UG, as already noted. The second example concerns two apparently unrelated phenomena, but which under one construal turn out to be related to the locality constraint case: an example of selective fossilization in the L2 English of a Chinese speaker described by Lardiere (1998a; 1998b; 2000);6 inconsistency in marking gender concord in the L2 French of English speakers (Hawkins, 1998). Lardieres informant arrived in the USA at the age of 22 when her first consistent exposure to English as an L2 began. She was recorded in conversation after 10 years of residence, and twice more 81/2 years later. The second 81/2-year period was one of near-total immersion in English. Lardiere reports the performance of the informant on three properties, none of which have morphophonological reflexes in Chinese: Case-marking of pronouns (e.g., hehimhis, Imemy, etc.), the marking of simple past tense (e.g., ran, walked) and the marking of the 3rd person singular -s. The results for the use of nominative Case-marked pronouns, simple past-tense marking of all verbs and 3rd person singular -s marking of thematic main verbs are given in Table 4. Hawkins examined L2 French data from native speakers of
Table 4 Correct use of the morphophonological reflexes of three properties in English by a Chinese speaker Sample 1 2 3 Nominative 49/49 (100%) 378/378 (100%) 76/76 (100%) Simple past 24/69 (34.8%) 191/548 (34.9%) 46/136 (33.8%) 3rd person singular -s 2/42 (4.8%) 0/4 (0%) 1/22 (4.5%)

Source: based on Lardiere, 1998a; 1998b.

6 Although the informant Patty is referred to in the text as a native speaker of Chinese, it should be noted that her linguistic background is varied (Lardiere, 1998a: 12). Her parents were native speakers of two Chinese languages: Hokkien and Mandarin. Patty herself was born in Indonesia and learned Indonesian at school, and later Cantonese in mainland China. Patty herself considers Hokkien and Mandarin to be her native languages.

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Roger Hawkins 361 English collected from a task where informants were asked to give an oral description of a short animated film. There were two groups, each consisting of 10 informants, one in the UK the other in Canada. The groups were comparable in that they were all university students and advanced speakers with similar lengths of exposure (although the Canadians had undergone a late immersion programme, while the UK informants had had tutored French plus a minimum of 6 months residence in France). The study focused on the consistency of informants in using target-like masculine- or feminine-marked articles: le (masculine) vs. la (feminine) for the definite article, and un (masculine) vs. une (feminine) for the indefinite. Results suggested that the errors made by informants were not equally distributed. Typically in the speech of an individual, one article from each pair was likely to be used in a more target-like way than the other, which was overgeneralized. For example, for a hypothetical target French set of un triangle (a triangle), un cercle (a circle), une pyramide (a pyramid), une balle (a ball), an individual might produce un triangle, un cercle, *un pyramide, une balle, where there is no incorrect use of une, but un is overgeneralized. However, the member of the pair which was most target-like varied across individuals. The overall distribution of gender-marked articles is shown in Table 5. The number of errors made indicates that one member of the masculinefeminine pair is more target-like than the other. Bruhn de Garavito and White (2000) found similar results in the L2 Spanish of (much less advanced) L1 French speakers. Lardiere has argued, in the case of her Chinese informant, that the abstract syntactic representation for English tense and agreement is present, but that she has a problem mapping the syntactic representation onto the correct morphophonological reflexes. Evidence for this comes from her perfect use of Casemarked pronouns. Pronouns in Chinese are not overtly marked for Case (and indeed are often null, since Chinese is a null argument language). She has, therefore, established appropriate L2 morphophonological reflexes in this case, even though L1 and L2
Table 5 Number of errors made in producing the more and less target-like members of masculinefeminine articles by two groups of L2 speakers Definite DPs Group UK Canada more TL 0/88 (0%) 4/104 (4%) less TL 16/133 (12%) 19/108 (18%) Indefinite DPs more TL less TL 3/76 (4%) 4/59 (7%) 26/135 (19%) 38/96 (40%)

Source: based on Hawkins, 1998.

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differ. On standard assumptions, nominative Case-marking is licensed (checked) between a DP and a finite tense category in a specifier-head configuration. Since finite T is required for Casemarking, and the informants Case-marking is perfect, it is not implausible to maintain that T is also abstractly specified for past tense and agreement. The reason why the informant is much less successful in marking the morphophonological reflexes of the latter is that in English they are affixal, whereas Case-marked pronouns are not, and it is affixes that cause this speaker difficulty. Bruhn de Garavito and White offer a similar explanation for the gender-concord case. They assume that the L2 speakers of French and Spanish reported above have assigned gender features to nouns, and abstractly this gender feature percolates to categories within the DP, like the articles. The problem for the L2 speakers arises in mapping the fully-specified DP onto the appropriate morphophonological reflexes of the articles. Both of these accounts are attempts to explain L2L1 differences from a UG perspective. The underlying assumption is that the morphological component of UG has changed in some way between childhood and adulthood (or at least the ability of the morphological component to map syntactic representations onto morphophonological forms). This then offers testable predictions for SLA research: We might expect to see older L2 learners having difficulty mapping syntactic representations to affixal reflexes in other domains. If correct, this line of enquiry is also consistent with a view that sees morphological structure as a discrete module of UG, distinct from syntactic representation. Hawkins (1998) has proposed a different interpretation of the gender-concord facts, which could be extended to the tense and agreement case. Suppose that percolation of gender features from the noun to other constituents within the same DP is viewed as an instance of feature checking involving an interpretable gender feature assigned to N, and uninterpretable gender features on constituents like articles which must be checked by N. If the uninterpretable gender features are made available as options by UG in the sense that languages like English have not selected them then English speakers learning French as an L2 may have problems accessing them. Because of this, learners have to model the gender-concord facts in a different way, perhaps using associative memory processes in the lexicon. It might be claimed that the speakers in question establish a default article (either masculine or feminine) and then learn a list of exceptions. Such a system would give rise to one member of each pair of gendermarked articles being overgeneralized, and the other largely target-

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Roger Hawkins 363 like, the kind of pattern observed. An extension of this idea to tense and agreement would require that the morphophonological reflexes in English result from a checking relation between the category T and the inflected verb. The absence of tense and agreement morphemes in Chinese would be the effect of an absence of uninterpretable features. Chinese speakers learning English as an L2 would then need to model tense and agreement marking differently; again, perhaps the uninflected verb would be a default form, and tense- and agreement-marked forms would be listed as exceptions. Selection of appropriate past-tense-marked and 3rdperson-singular-marked verb forms would then depend on whether an L2 learner had listed these forms in the lexicon and on the level of activation of the listed forms during lexical insertion into intended past tense / 3rd person singular contexts. Notice that this account is of the same order as the account of L2L1 differences in sensitivity to locality violations described above: It is the absence of optional uninterpretable features in the L1 grammar that forces L2 speakers to draw on other resources made available by UG. Whether either of these proposals the mapping problem account or the absence of uninterpretable features account turn out to be correct or not, they are the kinds of hypothesis that can lead to progress in developing a theory of SLA. If learners are able to construct target-like syntactic representations, but have persistent problems mapping representations to morphophonology, then it suggests that we need to focus more research effort on the nature of L2 morphology. If L2 learners have difficulty with optional uninterpretable syntactic features, then we need to find out more about how other resources made available by UG are deployed by L2 speakers. Similarly, in the case of UG; if either approach is correct, this will provide evidence that the relevant component of UG (morphology or uninterpretable features) have changed since childhood. If both accounts are wrong, it may be that UG has not changed at all, and that L2 research should be looking at interface relations between the language faculty and other components of mind more carefully. Whatever the outcome, difference-oriented studies will advance our understanding both of SLA and of UG, whereas POS-oriented studies can only confirm that L2 grammars are UG-derived. IV Conclusion SLA research which seeks out poverty of the stimulus (POS) phenomena in L2 grammars provides clear evidence that L2

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grammars are UG-derived. This is a finding of major importance in countering claims that SLA is fundamentally different from native language acquisition. Nevertheless, POS phenomena in L2 grammars are no more than glimpses of properties that can be found in clearer form in native grammars. I have argued that a more compelling reason for assuming that L2 grammars are UG-derived emerges in studies that aim to explain L2L1 differences. Such studies must account for the differences either in terms of changes in the way that UG interacts with other components of mind or in terms of changes that occur in components of UG. Such work has the potential not only to contribute to our understanding of the development and nature of L2 grammars, but also to offer a view of UG that complements insights gained from work on native grammars, native language acquisition and disordered language. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Usha Lakshmanan and an anonymous reviewer for perceptive comments on an earlier version of this article and for useful advice on bringing out the arguments more clearly. They are not to be held responsible for what remains. V References
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