The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics

THE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH MORPHOSYNTAX STUDIES IN THEORETICAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

VOLUME 31

Managing Editors Lyn Frazier, Dept. of Linguistics, University ofMassachusetts at Amherst Thomas Roeper, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Kenneth Wexler, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.

Editorial Board Robert Berwick, Artijicialintelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Manfred Bierwisch, Zentralinstitutfiir Sprachwissenschaft, Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin Merrill Garrett, University ofArizona, Tucson Lila Gleitman, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Mary-Louise Kean, University of California, Irvine Howard Lasnik, University of Connecticut at Storrs John Marshall, Neuropsychology Unit, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford Daniel Osherson, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Yukio Otsu, Keio University, Tokyo Edwin Williams, Princeton University

The titles published in this series are listed al the end ofthis volume. THE ACQUISITION OFSPANISH MORPHOSYNTAX

The L IIL2 Connection

Edited by

ANA TERESA PEREZ-LEROUX University of Toronto Canada

and

JUANA MUNOZ LICERAS University of Ottawa Canada

Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. A c.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4020-0975-4 ISBN 978-94-010-0291-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-010-0291-2

Printed an acid-free paper

AU Rights Reserved © 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originaily published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a comnuter svstem. for exclusive use bv the nurchaser of the work. CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

ANA T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND JUANA M. LICERAS ix Introduction: The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax.

AURORA BEL Early Verbs and the Acquisition ofthe Tense Feature in Spanish and Catalan.

MARIA JOSE EZEIZABARRENA 35 Root Infinitives in Two Pro-Drop Languages.

HANAKO FUJINO AND TETSUYA SANO 67 Aspects ofthe Null Object Phenomenon in Child Spanish.

LILIANA SANCHEZ 89 Spell-out Conditions for Interpretable Features in Ll and L2/Bilingual Spanish.

SILVINA MONTRUL AND ROUMYANA SLABAKOVA 115 The L2 Acquisition ofMorphosyntactic and Semantic Properties ofthe Aspectual Tenses Preterite and Imperfect.

JOYCE BRUHN DE GARAVITO AND LYDIA WHITE 153 The L2 Acquisition ofSpanish DPs: the Status ofGrammatical Features.

ANA T. PEREZ-LEROUX, ERIN O'ROURKE, GILLIAN LORD AND BEATRIZ CENTENO-CORTES 179 Inalienable Possession in Spanish: L2-Acquisition at the Lexicon-Syntax Interface.

JUANA M. LICERAS, LOURDES DIAZ AND TERHI SALOMAA-ROBERTSON 209 The Compounding Parameter and the Word Marker Hypothesis: Accounting for the Acquisition ofSpanish N-N Compounding.

Author Index 239

Index 243

v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We owe special thanks to Tom Roeper and Ken Wexler, for their support in the conception and eventual publication of this volume. We also thank Jacqueline Bergsma, Iris Klug, Susan Jones and Vanessa Nijweide, at the Kluwer offices, for their friendly and generous editorial assistance; to Tamara Alkasey and Michaela Pirvulescu, who provided invaluable assistance with other editorial matters, and two anonymous reviewers at Kluwer, for their valuable insight, and for sharing our sense that this kind of work is needed. Completion of this volume was possible with a grant from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University ofToronto to A. T. Perez-Leroux.

VB ANA T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND JUANA M. LICERAS

INTRODUCTION

The acquisition ofSpanish morphosyntax

1. RATIONALE AND CONTENTS OF THE VOLUME

This volume evolved from the need to share with colleagues and students in the fields of psycholinguistic and linguistic theory, and with colleagues working in related disciplines, some recent developments in the exploration of the central questions regarding language acquisition, as addressed with Spanish data. While we understand that questions about the language faculty should mainly be addressed by comparative research, at times it is pertinent to focus on a given language. The sociological motivation in this case lies in the recent expansion in the number of scholars and the amount of resources now devoted to the formal study of the Spanish language in general, and of the acquisition of Spanish in particular. The scholarly motivation parallels the sociological: as more aspects of the syntactic structure of Spanish are better characterized, the easier it becomes to make explicit descriptions ofthe developmental patterns, and to understand the relevance of such phenomena to linguistic theory. A given language, such as Spanish, can provide very important tests ofspecific hypotheses. This book presents a collection of research articles exploring two central issues of language acquisition research: the problem of how learners acquire knowledge of language that extends beyond the input, and the problem of how grammar develops over time and why intermediate grammars take the form they do. Via the analysis of data from child and adult acquisition of Spanish, the various papers included here deal with the issue of how language data that at times differs from the target grammar (that ofthe adult, native speaker of Spanish) is represented in the mind of the learners. Specifically, these papers explore the issue of optionality in developing grammars and the triggering relationship between morphology and syntactic knowledge.

The various chapters are framed within current generative approaches to linguistic theory (Chomsky 1981, 1993, 1995; Kayne 1994; Halle and Marantz 1993). According to this theory, language acquisition takes place via the implementation ofthe innate principles and the setting ofthe parameters of Universal Grammar (the linguistic biological endowment which characterizes the human species) upon exposure to language particular input. While innate principles are realized in all languages, parameters account for language variation and are fixed via the triggering effect provided by the linguistic environment. Chomsky's Principles and Parameters theory, and therefore, the notion ofparameters, entered the cognitive arena at the onset of the 80's with the publication of Lectures on Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981). The specific theory of language acquisition proposed there-though very programmatic- contained the ingredients needed to set up a very active research program. The explorations of these questions took place in separate, if often parallel roads in the study of child and adult language!. In her work on early null subjects, Hyams (1986) set out a comprehensive program for exploring the parameter-setting model in acquisition. Most research aimed at the crosslinguistic comparison of a wide range ofgrammatical phenomena (wh-movement, binding theory, emergence of functional projections, etc.) sought primarily to defme a) how principles constrain intermediate grammars, and b) what are the triggers that lead learners to set the parameters of the target language. In the area of second language acquisition, this program examined how L2 learners confront input data to construct a new grammar (Flynn 1983, 1987; White 1986, 1989; Liceras 1983, 1986). This program had three distinct characteristics that made it a radical departure from previous explorations. First, its biological roots-the linguistic capacity is understood as a mental organ which "grows" via exposure to the linguistic input provided by the environment (any given natural language)-provide an interesting point of departure for the study of non-native acquisition as a special case of primary language acquisition. Second, its psychological roots-the modular view of the mind and consequently of the linguistic capacity-address both the issue of the actual grammatical representations which are acquired as well as the issue of the learning and processing mechanisms which explain how learning takes place. Third, its comprehensive and formal model of grammar, with the search for an explanation of universality and parametric variation as its central goals, provides the categories needed to compare all languages, including non• native grammars. These fundamental goals remain in Chomsky's Minimalist Program, but the tension between principles and parametric variation is radically redefmed. In minimalist terms, the language faculty consists of a computational system that generates representations that must be well-formed and interpretable at INTRODUCTION Xl the two levels which interface with external systems: phonetic form and logical form. Parametrization, meaning the range of formal variation among the world's languages, is represented in the inventory of formal features of individual languages: "variation in language is essentially morphological in character" (Chomsky 1995:7). A welcome (direct or indirect) outcome ofthis view is the debate concerning the role of morphology in the model, and consequently, in language acquisition. In the minimalist spirit, the essays included here frame developmental issues primarily in terms of whether and how formal features are selected and incorporated into the learners' grammars. The volume is organized into two sections. The fIrst section ofthe volume incorporates four chapters in the areas of fIrst and bilingual language acquisition by children. The fIrst contribution is a study ofearly verbs in the corpus data of3 children learning Spanish and 3 children learning Catalan by Aurora Bel. Her data provide evidence that the tense feature is present in the mental representation of these children from the earlier stages, independent of the fact that children do produce truncated structures. The various forms in the corpora she examined do not appear in random distribution: present tense forms appear in present tense contexts, the few past tenses attested appear with past reference, and reference to non-present times is achieved with infinitives. Maria Jose Ezeizabarrena's chapter argues against the view that there are quantitative differences in the distribution of root infmitives in prodrop and non-prodrop languages. Her study analyzes the corpus oftwo Spanish-Basque bilingual children, teasing apart the production of ungrammatical root infmitives from those that are discourse-licensed, or embedded into a null modal base. Her data suggest that root infmitive forms are frequent in Basque, and less so in Spanish, and remain present in later stages of development in both languages. In their chapter, Hanako Fujino and Tetsuya Sano examine the data from three of the children acquiring Spanish available in the CHILDES corpus, identifying the existence of a null object stage. They argue that this null object phenomena results from a failure to spell-out the clitic, and that it does not depend on either development of CP, on the setting of the null object parameter, or on processing factors. Liliana Sanchez discusses the acquisition ofobject clitics in Spanish in contact with Quechua in two groups of children: Spanish monolinguals and L2/bilinguals. She considers the question ofthe acquisition ofinterpretable phi-features in interaction with discourse related notions such as topic. Sanchez identifIes differences in the interpretation of null objects and clitic doubling in the two groups of learners. She speculates that input conditions may lead to differences in the [semantic] conditions on feature spell-out although not in the presence ofgiven spell-out possibilities. XlI A.T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND J.M. LICERAS

The second section contains four contributions in the area ofadult second language acquisition. Silvina Montrul and Roumyana Slabakova explore the L2 acquisition of aspectual interpretations ofpreterite and imperfect past tenses in Spanish. They argue that English-speaking adult L2 learners of Spanish are able to successfully acquire the morphosyntactic and interpretive properties of these tenses, and that there is a strong connection between the acquisition ofthe inflectional morphology and the acquisition ofthe semantic interpretation associated with the formal features [±perfective]. Most intermediate learners in their study had not acquired the semantic contrast, but the advanced learners performed like native speakers in all the combinations of tenses and aspectual verb classes, except for the use of imperfect with achievement predicates. The authors suggest problems with the ability to perform aspectual coertion in the second language. Joyce Bruhn de Garavito and Lydia White examine the L2 acquisition of two aspects of DP structure in two groups of French speaking classroom learners of Spanish: gender features and adjective placement. While word order of the adjective was mastered readily, gender acquisition appears more problematic. More agreement errors were produced with adjectives than with articles, with indefmites than defmite articles, and with feminine than with masculine nouns. The authors suggest that the problems do not depend on the absence ofthe gender feature as such, but on the use of a default gender• marking strategy to deal with the difficulties stemming from the lexically idiosyncratic nature of gender. In their chapter, Ana Teresa Perez-Leroux, Erin O'Rourke, Gilian Lord and Beatriz Centeno-Cortes study the adult L2 acquisition of the properties of inalienable possession objects in three groups of adult learners of Spanish from an English speaking background. Their study examines the replacement of possessive determiners by the defmite determiner, and concludes that learners are aware of the underspecified nature of inalienable possession objects in Spanish, but that the dative clitic plays an important role in triggering the acquisition of the possessor raising construction. The chapter by Juana Liceras, Lourdes Diaz and Terhi Salomaa-Robertson presents a study on the production of N-N compounds in the L2 Spanish of adult learners from three language backgrounds: French, English and Finnish. The authors examine issues of productivity and directionality of the compound as well as of the placement ofinflectional morphology within the N-N compound, in order to address the issue of adult access to the formal feature [+WORD MARKER] that it is said to determine N-N compound structure in Spanish. They conclude that adult learners might not be sensitive to abstract features because they access input via a top-down strategy. Two main themes are explored in this book. One is what are the triggers that lead learners to set parameters, which in minimalist terms concerns the INTRODUCTION Xlll identification ofthe inventory offormal features, and ofthe values of feature strength that characterize the target grammar. The second is how to interpret variable performance in learners, and how such variable performance relates to the representation of formal features. These themes are treated differently in the L1 and the L2 field, and the studies we present are representative of these distinct research styles. In what follows we discuss each of them in tum.

2. OPTIONALITY

The issue of variability or optionality ofa structure in a given developmental stage is one intimately linked to questions of evidence and observation in acquisition research. What does it mean when a given aspect ofthe grammar that is obligatory in the target grammar appears to be optional in the learners' grammar? The parameter setting model of acquisition directly predicts discrete shifts between stages, reflecting the selection or 'setting' of parameters. Explanation of variability between structures requires that additional assumptions be built into the model. "If, as it seems to be the case, changes in child grammar are actually reflected in changes in relative frequencies of structures that extend over months or more, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the child has a probabilistic or weighted grammar in some form." (Abney 1996:3)

But how can this be interpreted within a formal, as opposed to a probabilistic approach to language learning? The interpretation ofoptionality has non-trivial effects on acquisition research, affecting methodological constructs as basic as criteria for acquisition, as we will see below. Theoretically, the implications are even deeper. The minimalist program, by emphasizing the exploration oflanguage as a 'perfect object', views evidence for optionality as particularly problematic: as Hyams (2001) points out "[...] within current theory, optional processes are ruled out by licensing principles or by economy considerations" (Hyams 2001:34). Optionality in developmental stages reintroduces the traditional learnability problem of the relation between subset and superset grammars. If a structure is optional, appearing in free variation with other structure(s), what can cause the child to switch from the superset grammar with multiple structures to a subset grammar with only one structural possibility? The discussion below broadly illustrates the three prevailing approaches to variability: performance failure accounts (Adjemian 1976, Towell and Hawkins 1994, Epstein et al. 1996, Prevost and White 2000), optional rules accounts (Hoekstra and Hyams 1996, see discussion in Hyams 2001) and hidden bilingualism (Liceras 1986, Lebeaux 1988, Roeper 1999). XIV A.T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND J.M. LICERAS

Recent discussions of optionality in child language dwell on two topics: emergence of functional projections and optional infmitives. The emergence of a theory of functional projections refocused the debate on the problem of continuity between child and adult grammars: in what sense is telegraphic speech, with its limited syntax and absence of functional morphology, different from adult grammars? This question managed to split the field into three groups: those who believe functional projections are radically absent at the earliest stage and emerge as the result of maturation; those who believe functional projections emerge gradually based on input that enable setting of functional parameters; and those who believe that all functional projections are totally present but without fully specified features. The issue of variability played an important (ifnot always explicit) role in the debate. For instance, Paradis and Genesee (1997) observe that the different criteria for acquisition of a functional projection is a confound in the strong/weak continuity debate. While acquisition is actually a gradual process, the various participants in the continuity debate employed different quantitative boundaries as cut-off points for 'acquisition'. Criteria employed have ranged from first productive use (which can reflect a performance as low as 10-15% of target usage), to various performance criteria ranging from 60% correct usage (Vainikka and Young Scholten 1994) to the traditional stricter criteria of 90% correct usage advocated by Brown (1973) (Paradis and Genesee 1997). Within the various areas of the study of the emergence of functional projections, special attention in the last decade has been paid to the 'optional infmitive' (Wexler 1994) or 'root infmitive' (Rizzi 1994) phenomenon. This phenomenon is defmed as the existence of a developmental stage when children allow infmitives to coexist with finite verbs in root contexts. Researchers have explored correlates between the root infmitive phenomenon and language typology (i.e., languages with and without infmitive morphology, prodrop vs. non-prodrop languages, etc.; see discussion by Ezeizabarrena in our volume), and to the role of specificity and feature specification in the root infmitive phenomenon (Hoekstra and Hyams 1996). With increased emphasis on a rich semantic interpretation ofearly utterances, the very existence of a truly optional stage has been challenged (see, for instance, Hyams 2001, and the chapter by Bel). While most of the research on functional projections has focused on inflectional morphology, recent analyses of clitics as morphemes of object agreement have generated new interest in the study of the acquisition of clitics. In this volume, Fujino and Sano argue for a null object stage in Spanish, where the null object is licensed by a phonologically null clitic. They argue against processing accounts of object omission by noting the existence of a trade-off between null object and clitic pronouns as clitics INTRODUCTION xv increase in frequency, while lexical objects remain constant. The existence of a null clitic is, in their view, a pure spell-out process. Sanchez (this volume) also considers the role ofdifferent spell-out conditions related to the topic of the sentence in the production of clitics by bilingual speakers. She proposes that there is parametric variation in the conditions for the spell-out of interpretable features on object clitics~ and that the variation, which is related to the topic of the sentence, leads to a distribution of clitics that is parallel for syntactic contexts but differentiated for semantic contexts. In the field of SLA, the issue of optionality, or variability as it is most commonly referred to, becomes even more critical, as protracted variability is taken to indicate that L2 acquisition is fundamentally different from L1 acquisition (Johnson and Schacter 1988, etc.). Some researchers have developed accounts for structural as well as performance effects. Adjemian (1976) considers permeability (i.e., internal inconsistency in interlanguage grammars) as the most salient characteristic of L2 development, as the result ofa system 'in flux' that relies both on the Ll and the learners' grammars. In a similar vein, Towell and Hawkins (1994) work out a model which aims to explain variability as the result of the on-line integration of knowledge originating from different modules: "[...] more plausible is the possibility that variability arises at the point where L2 grammatical knowledge becomes involved with real-time language comprehension and production." (Towell and Hawkins: 143-144) Liceras (1986, 1996a) argues that L2 variability may be a reflection of parametric indecision, not unlike native systems which can have pockets of unresolved parametric choices (Liceras 1986): "Fossilization is defined relative to penneability as pennanent parametric variation. A fossilized rule will always reflect the existence of competing analyses in the nonnative grammar of advanced learners. Taken in this sense, preposition copy [i.e., 'To whom did you give the book to?'] will be a fosilized rule ifthere is an area ofthe grammar or a specific context where it mayor may not apply and no definite solution is given. Fossilization, like penneability, is also possible in native grammars. The English agreement rule mentioned above [ 'Is the police/Are the police.. .'] is an instance of fossilization in the case ofthose native speakers who cannot give a definite solution to its application." (Liceras 1986:85) Roeper (1999), taking advantage of some features of the Minimalist program in linguistics, makes the same point about Ll acquisition as well as Ll end-states. He suggests that all optionality in language is encoded in lexically-linked domains, and should be characterized as a form of bilingualism.

There are important leamability-based arguments that favor the "hidden bilingualism" approach to variability in learners' grammars. Lebeaux (1988) distinguishes Qetween approaches that assume a constant grammar partially xvi A.T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND J.M. LiCERAS masked by the exercise of parsing strategies, and approaches where no grammatical masking occurs. Regarding the former type of approaches, he points out: "[... J when the granunar/computation system fails to come up with an analysis, an exogenous parsing strategy enters in and returns an analysis not countenanced by current granunar: the child's analysis, so to speak, "falls out of' the granunar, and returns a value which is not one of the possible permissible targets." (Lebeaux 1988:193) Instead, Lebeaux argues, parsing effects are relevant only via the grammar itself, and ifthe child analysis fail, it falls into another permissible grammar, possibly representing an earlier state ofthe grammar. Note that his argument is geared towards 'processing strategies' accounts but is not necessarily pertinent to missing morphology accounts such as in Epstein, Flynn and Martohardjono (1996), who maintain that adult learners have "lexical and morphophonetic deficits", (Epstein et al. 1996: 702; see also Prevost and White 2000). In a similar vein, Bruhn de Garavito and White (this volume) argue that L2 learners exhibit some problems with the realization of gender, but show that this problem is independent of whether the Ll is a language with grammatical gender. They suggest that this is the result of a morphological access problem, not unlike what goes on with root infmitives, with masculine acting as a morphological default just as infmitives are the default in the domain of tense. In the area of word formation, Liceras and her colleagues fmd that, while N-N compounding is a productive process in beginning and advanced stages of L2 development, all learner groups hesitate between head-initial (target) and head-fmal (non• target) compounds. Although individual data is not specifically discussed in this chapter, the observed variability applies within individuals as well as within groups. The problem ofoptionality is not salient in the data in Perez-Leroux et al., as learners variable performance seems to be determined by a presence ofthe clitic and not in free variation. Montrul and Slabakova also do not fmd a problem with variability as they fmd that L2 learners are better at distinguishing the morphology ofthe preterite and imperfect than at deriving the full range of semantic distinctions associated with these aspectual tenses. They suggest that the difference between the fmdings of morphological deficiency such as those in Prevost and White (1999) or Lardiere (1998) is the result ofa task difference (production versus comprehension).

3. TRIGGERS INTRODUCTION xvii

Central to the debate about the role ofmorphology in linguistic theory and in language acquisition are the detennination ofthe locus of language variation and the characterization of the elements that serve as triggers for setting the parameters of the various languages. Since the initial proposal of the null subject parameter (Chomsky 1981, Rizzi 1982, Jaeggli 1982), two opposing trends emerged. One trend led to the proliferation of micro-parameters (parameters with only one or two syntactic properties) located in the various sub-components ofthe grammar (Atkinson· 1992). The other led to efforts to redefme the null subject parameter to make it able to accommodate the growing set of typological data; this is the case of the morphological unifonnity principle (Jaeggli and Safrr 1989) or the null argument parameter (Hyams 1994). But the actual turning point for parametric theory was the central role that functional categories and the binary system associated with them began to occupy in this model ofgrammar. These features, which were the underlying triggers in Pollock's (1989) V-movement parameter, could account for a larger cluster of properties to the point that it became possible to talk about super-parameters (Authier 1992; Liceras 1997). Thus, abstract features became the triggers for the parametrized properties oflanguages. As for parametric variation, a consensus emerged around the appropriateness of placing the locus of linguistic variation (and therefore parameter-setting) in the lexicon, guided by Borer's (1984) and Wexler and Manzini's (1987) lexical parametrization hypothesis. The initial proposal encompassed the entire lexicon (functional categories--detenniner phrases, agreement phrases and complementizer phrases-as well as substantive categories-nouns, verbs, adjectives or prepositions). Subsequent fonnulations ofthe hypothesis restricted the locus of parameter setting to functional categories (Fukui 1986; Chomsky 1992). While the latter view (the functional parametrization hypothesis) to an extent represents the standard view, there have been recent attempts to revert to a revised or refined version of the lexical parametrization hypothesis. These new proposals have materialized as related but apparently conflicting accounts of whether the locus of parametric variation lies in: a) the lexicon-be it the lexicon as such (Snyder 1995), the phonetically realized functional categories (Speas 1994; Vainikka, in press), or the abstract features of functional categories (Hyams 1996; Hoekstra, Hyams and Becker 1997; or, b) in both word order patterns and the properties ofwords (Baker 1995; Beard 1996; Piera 1995). For our present purposes, the relevance of these various accounts of parametric variation and their implications for the relationship morphology/syntax lies in the nature of the triggers they proposed. In the case of Hyams (1996) and Hoekstra, Hyams and Becker (1997) 'rich inflection', understood in relative tenns, accounts for the existence ofabstract features of functional categories. The abstract features ([+person], XVlll A.T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND J.M. LICERAS

[+number], [+tense], etc.) associated with individual functional categories act as triggers for syntactic operations. However, they are innate, which implies that it is the syntax (as represented by these abstract features) that guides the Ll leamer, so that he/she is able to grow a grammar compatible with the input data. For Speas (1994) and Vainikka (in press) the triggering effect lies in the overt realization of inflectional morphemes, so that a given functional category is projected only in those cases in which they are phonetically realized. Therefore, learners will only activate those functional categories for which a given language provides overt morphological markers, and these markers seem to be specified for individual functional categories. In the case of Snyder's (1995) compounding parameter, it is the [+/- affIxal] nature of lexical items (nouns and verbs) that constitutes the trigger for acquiring the various constructions related to this parameter, and this specific trigger is cross-categorial in that it applies to both nouns and verbs. The common feature to proposals that place parametric variation in the actual make-up of words and word-order patterns is that they move away from functional categories and towards a word-based approach. For instance, Baker's (1995) typology reduces syntactic differences to head directionality-green house versus casa verde (i.e., house green)--and morphological properties of lexical items. Directionality is also at the center of Beard's (1995) account of the differences between English and Spanish deverbal compounds (can opener versus abrelatas), which parallels the adjective/noun order of English and the noun/adjective order of Spanish. Finally, Piera's (1995) explanation for the different direction of English and Spanish N-N compounds (wiener dog / perro salchicha) is based on the different make-up ofnouns in these two languages. The distinction between the lexicaVnon-lexical nature (word-like versus morpheme-like) attributed to inflectional affIXes is at the core of recent approaches to morphology (Anderson 1992; Aronoff 1993; Lieber 1992; Halle and Marantz 1993; Beard 1995; Baker 1988; 1995; Chomksy 1995). While this may account for the different types oftriggers proposed, what is of interest to the L2 field is whether phonetically realized and null inflectional morphemes and derivational affIXes or compounding operations playa role in the acquisition ofnon-native syntax. In either case (abstract functional features, or basic, minimal word elements) there seems to be concrete progress towards identifying the actual triggers for language acquisition (Lightfoot 1991; Atkinson 1992), i.e., the minimum amount ofstructure that a learner must be exposed to in order to set a parameter (be it a word, a phrase, or a sentence). The problem, both in the L1 and the L2 field, centers on the degree of abstraction of the triggering unit. From the perspective of Merger theory, Roeper (1998) proposed a lexically inductive view of triggers. At the earlier stages, at the point when INTRODUCTION XIX children display pivot-open grammars, children merge whatever elements have entered their lexicon, project the specifier and complement relations, and extract and select (in the acquisition sense) abstract formal features from those lexical elements. Part of the language specific process of feature identification lies in seeking morphological subparts ofwords. "The child must Merge lexical items in making specific sentences. In creating a grammar from those sentences (either spoken or heard), she must determine possible mergeable items. The lexical items projected in this manner will contain Formal Features which the child must, somehow, identifY, and potentially generalize." (Roeper 1998: I) An important aspect ofthis discussion is the problem of constraining the process so that every semantic distinction does not function as a Formal Feature. Roeper suggests· that this is the major current challenge to both linguistic theory and acquisition theory alike: " The answer to that question lies in determining (a) an inventory of universal Formal Features, and (b) hierarchical and implicational relations among Formal Features that will restrict the hypothesis space considered by the child" (Roeper 1998: 17) The exploration of these ideas takes diverging paths in L1 and L2 acquisition. In the child language field, lack of coincidence between a putative trigger and a given syntactic phenomena is treated as a theoretical problem (the proper identification of the formal defmition of triggers) or an empirical problem (the proper identification of the true source of a given typological correlation). By way ofexample, see Snyder and Senghas (1997), who despite the robust typological association between morphological gender and noun drop, fmd no developmental relation between the two. In the L2 field, comparable dissociations are typically discussed in terms of access or of viability of parameter resetting in adult language learning. Proposed explanations for the nature ofL2 acquisition rest on the assumption that L2 learners, unlike Ll learners, are not sensitive to input 'elements' because they cannot make use of primary domain specific procedures (Liceras 1996a, 1996b; Liceras and Diaz 1999). In other words, the prevailing view is that rather than making use of morpholexical triggers to project the abstract features that create language specific syntactic structure, L2 learners resort to innate principles, L1 syntactic properties or superficial L2 syntactic patterns to build the morphosyntax ofthe target language. In our volume, the various papers on child language consider different phenomena, and explanations for development vary. The chapters on root infmitives by Bel and by Ezeizabarrena do not focus directly on parameter setting, and the question of triggers is not fundamental. Among the various explanations for development, the authors consider the lexical learning hypothesis and semantic/pragmatic developmental explanations. In each xx A.T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND J.M. LICERAS case, the authors point to the substantial morpho-lexical complexity that is entailed in the acquisition of the mature grammars. This is also true of Bruhn de Garavito and White with regards to the acquisition of gender in Spanish. These authors, like Montrul and Slabakova, focus on the general role of learning full paradigms (masculine/feminine, preterite/imperfect, respectively) in restructuring grammars. The chapters by Perez-Leroux, O'Rourke, Lord and Centeno Cortes, and by Liceras, Diaz and Saloma• Robertson seek to identify the actual pieces of morphology involved as triggers: the former examines the effect of clitics, and the latter examines adult learners' access to the abstract word-marker feature of Spanish. Of special relevance in the L1 versus L2 parameter-setting debate is the proposal in Sanchez's chapter. She argues that differences in input as determined by the contribution of Quechua in the bilingual population may lead to differences in the conditions on the spell out of formal features in the new grammar, independently ofthe presence ofgiven spell-out possibilities.

ANA T. PEREZ-LEROUX University ofToronto JUANA M. LICERAS University ofOttawa

NOTES

I The nature of our approach makes it unnecessary to address the learning versus acquisition debate as fonnulated in the 70's and 80's (for references to this dichotomy see Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991, Liceras 1992 or Ellis 1994).

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