The Development of Second Language Grammars: A Generative Approach (review)

In addition to an introduction, this volume contains a number of papers presented at the third Conference in Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition, GASLA95, held in May 1995 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. The book is divided into three parts: Part 1 examines conceptual and methodological issues in L2A research. Part 2 consists of five papers focusing on ‘Current perspectives on generative L2A studies’, and Part 3, containing eight chapters, investigates ‘New directions in generative L2A studies’. Each chapter has its own bibliography. The book concludes with a list of authors, a name index, and a subject index.

In the introduction, Klein and Martohardjono provide a survey of the major research questions in generative L2A today: the role of UG, the initial state of L2, and the possibility of parameter resetting. They also address issues of methodology in L2A studies and offer valuable recommendations for improved research designs.

In Part 2, Helen Smith Cairns writes a brief over-view of methodological issues common to both L1 and L2 acquisition research. Philippe Prévost investigates the L2A of German, focusing on verb movement outside of IP. Silvina A.Montrul explores the acquisition of dative clitic constructions in Spanish, raising the possibility that parameter resetting does not occur instantaneously but may be a gradual process. The study by Juana M. Liceras, Lourdes Díaz, and Denyse Maxwell investigates the L2A of Spanish null subjects. Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux and Xiaoli Li present a study of L1 Chinese speakers acquiring relative clauses in L2 English.

The first chapter in Part 3, by Lydia White, Cynthia Brown, Joyce Bruhn-Garavito, Dongdong Chen, Makiko Hirakawa, and Silvina Montrul, studies the acquisition of L2 English psych verbs. ‘Just parsing through’ is an investigation by Elaine Klein into how processing studies contribute to our understanding of L2A. Eva M. Fernández examines the processing strategies of monolingual L1 English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers who learned English before and after the age of 10. The contributions by Tej K. Bhatia and William C. Ritchie address code-switching and code-mixing of bilinguals and ‘light verbs’ in bilingual code-switching. Both papers offer explanations for these phenomena within theoretically motivated frameworks. Noriaki Yusa examines wh-island effects in L2 English. The chapter by Daniel Robertson and Antonella Sorace proposes an alternative explanation for the well-researched V2 constraint in German. The final chapter in the book, by Janet Dean Fodor, deals with learnability theory and raises interesting new perspectives on triggers and parameter theory.

The title of the book alludes to the fact that the contributions are couched within the framework of Chomsky’s principles and parameters or the more recent minimalist program. Several studies suggest that the minimalist program offers principled explanations for various L2 phenomena which have been under investigation for some time. The contributions in this volume offer new insights into L2A and lead the way for further empirical research.