My goals in this paper are (a) to argue that parameter-resetting is the wrong metaphor for explaining variability in the production of morphological inflection in second language acquisition; (b) to attempt to illustrate just a few of the types of learning problems confronting an adult native speaker of one language who is learning the grammatical features of another; and (c) to underscore the seemingly mundane and obvious point that such learning involves figuring out how to reconfigure features into new or different formal configurations in the L2. The claim that second language acquisition requires parameter-resetting was an idea that carried great promise. It offered a principled way to cope with the issue of L1 influence in L2A, although in my view it has never coped well with the issue of variable performance—which of course is a hallmark of second language development. In general, however, the failure of many adult language learners to reach nativelike proficiency could be modeled in terms of the failure or inability to reset one or more parameters from the L1 value to that of the L2. In this paper I would like to address a more recent and theoretically interesting instantiation of parameter-resetting-failure in SLA, known as the representational deficit approach (e.g. Hawkins 2000, 2003, Hawkins & Chan 1997, Hawkins & Liszka 2003, Tsimpli 2003). This approach attributes L2 inflectional variability or error to a failure in the selection of parameterized formal features. The theoretical point of departure is that of Chomsky’s more recent Minimalist assumptions, as exemplified in the quote shown in (1) from Chomsky (2001):

www.lingref.com/cpp/gasla/7/paper1165.pdf

On Morphological Competence

A first dictionary of linguistics and phonetics

http://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/Christina.Tortora/files/bernstein&tortora2005.pdf

Two types of possessive forms in English

In this study we investigate the linguistic performance of a school age French-Greek simultaneous bilingual boy with specific language impairment (SLI) on the production of subject-verb agreement, object clitic pronouns and wh-questions. In addition, we compare his performance on these linguistic structures with that of two French-Greek bilingual children with typical development matched on language age. Furthermore, we discuss the performance of the child with SLI in the light of published data from monolingual French and Greek school-age children with SLI, as reported in the relevant literature. The results indicated that the performance of the bilingual French-Greek-speaking child with SLI was highly comparable to that of bilingual French-Greek typically developing children and monolingual children with SLI speaking French or Greek. In addition, the results revealed a language effect on the performance of the bilingual child with SLI on subject-verb agreement, object clitics and wh-questions. We adopt a comparative linguistic approach to interpret the results and argue that the specific linguistic properties of Greek and French were significant determinants for the manifestation of SLI in each language. We suggest that bilingualism per se did not aggravate the language deficits in this child with SLI. Finally, we discuss the clinical implications of our study for language intervention in bilingual individuals with SLI.

Subject–verb agreement, object clitics and wh-questions in bilingual French–Greek SLI: the case study of a French–Greek-speaking child with SLI

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2009.; Includes bibliographical
 references. This study investigated the interpretation of wh-in-situ expressions in L2 Korean
 by adult native speakers of English. Previous L2 studies within a generative grammar framework
 focused on knowledge of constraints on wh-movement in languages such as English, and
 attributed non-nativelike outcomes to a failure by learners to select a strong uninterpretable
 wh-feature that is argued to parametrically distinguish wh-movement from wh-in-situ languages
 (Hawkins & Chan 1997; Hawkins & Hattori 2006). However, this dissertation
 argues that such parameter-resetting accounts are not sufficient to capture the nature of the
 learning problems facing native English speakers acquiring Korean.; In Korean, wh-in-situ
 words can receive multiple readings. For example, mwues 'THING' receives a question reading
 ('what') when it occurs with a question particle, but it has an obligatory indefinite reading
 ('something') when it co-occurs with rising intonation in matrix interrogatives or with a
 declarative particle in embedded clauses. Thus, Korean wh-expressions are variables which
 require particular licensing environments to be interpreted (Aoun & Li 1993).; In this
 study, 47 native English speakers at high-intermediate and advanced proficiency levels of L2
 Korean were administered two types of translation tasks along with a truth-value judgment task
 in order to explore their knowledge of Korean wh-expressions according to the contextual
 co-occurrence of relevant intonation patterns and sentential particles. The results indicated
 that English-speaking learners from both proficiency groups showed statistically better
 performance on the question reading than on the indefinite reading in both prosodic and
 morphological licensing environments. The incorrect question interpretation declines as
 development proceeds, but non-targetlike interpretations persist among several advanced
 learners.; These findings suggest that the greatest difficulty for adult L2 learners does not
 reside in parametric selection, because both L1 and L2 grammars select the relevant features
 generating wh-expressions. Instead, the L2 learners whose L1 wh-words are lexicalized with an
 operator and a variable together within a single lexical item appear to have difficulty in
 reconfiguring these features into a different L2 configuration in which wh-elements are
 variables and its licensors are realized on distinct lexical items. This study implements a
 Feature-Reassembly approach (Lardiere 2008) to best account for the L2 acquisition
 data.

/pdf/the-acquisition-of-wh-in-situ-constructions-in-second-3ekxt8fbtc.pdf

The acquisition of wh -in -situ constructions in second language acquisition

Case, Agreement and EPP: Evidence from an English-speaking child

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Case, Agreement and EPP: Evidence from an English-speaking child