Negation in early German-English Interlanguage: more Valueless Features in the L2 initial state

Abstract

In Eubank (1993/94), I argued that the apparent syntactic optionality one observes in, for example, the placement of medial adverbs vis-à-vis thematic verbs in French-English Interlanguage can be explained if one assumes that the relevant parametric values of French do not transfer into the English L2 initial state. What one finds instead is a nonvalue of sorts, which I dubbed <inert>. In this article, I extend this view of 'Valueless Features' by examining data from Wode (1981) on the L2 acquisition of English by speakers of German. In fact, what I show here is that, in spite of important differences between the French-English and the German-English data, Valueless Features extends in a fairly natural way. In addition, however, I also examine two views that differ from Valueless Features, namely, the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis of Schwartz and Sprouse (e.g., 1994) and the Minimal Trees of Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994). Here, a careful review of the acquisitional data - either the French-English data or the German-English data - suggests that these views may not be as straightforward as they may otherwise appear.