Universal Grammar and the acquisition of French verb movement by native speakers of English

Abstract

White (1989) has shown that L1 English-speaking learners of L2 French appear to be more successful in acquiring the postverbal location of French manner and frequency adverbs than L1 French-speaking learners of L2 English are in acquiring the preverbal location of English manner and frequency adverbs. One implication of recent work by Pollock (1989) on the structure of English and French clauses is, however, that the task of acquiring the placement of manner and frequency adverbs should be the same for both sets of learners, because English provides learners with as much positive syntactic evidence for preverbal manner/frequency adverbs as French does for the postverbal location of such adverbs. The problem, then, is to explain why there should be this difference in success. On the basis of a detailed study of the developing intuitions of English-speaking adult learners of L2 French it is suggested in this article that the English-speakers' success is only apparent. Both groups of learners have great difficulty in resetting a parametrized property of the functional category Agr, but the English- speaking learners of French are able to make use of nonparametrized properties of Universal Grammar to handle surface syntactic differences between English and French, properties which are not so readily available to the French-speaking learners of English. It is suggested that this finding is in line with an emerging view about the role of parametrized functional categories in second language acquisition.