Abstract
The novelty of Lardiere's proposal does not reside in her so-called `rehabilitation' of Contrastive Analysis. In generative second language acquisition research, appeal to the best available analyses and descriptions of the languages under investigation has always been a top priority, whether the focus was parameters, functional categories or features. The novelty resides in her putting feature assembly at the forefront of the research agenda. However, arguing for feature assembly, Lardiere fails to highlight the validity and potential of constructs such as parameter-setting and feature selection, mainly because feature assembly cannot exist without feature selection, and because the deductive value of parameters can be enhanced by research meant to discover how features combine.
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