This study of first-language (L1) Russian children acquiring English as a second
language (L2) investigates the reasons behind omission of verbal inflection in L2
acquisition and argues for presence of functional categories in L2 grammar. Analyses
of spontaneous production data show that the child L2 learners (n = 20),
while omitting inflection, almost never produce incorrect tense/agreement
morphology. Furthermore, the L2 learners use suppletive inflection at a
significantly higher rate than affixal inflection, and overgenerate be
auxiliary forms in utterances lacking progressive participles (e.g., they are
help people). A grammaticality judgement task of English tense/agreement
morphology similarly shows that the child L2 English learners are significantly more
sensitive to the be paradigm than to inflection on thematic verbs. These
findings suggest that Tense is present in the learners’ L2 grammar, and
that it is instantiated through forms of the be auxiliary. It is argued
that omission of inflection is due to problems with the realization of surface
morphology, rather than to feature impairment, in accordance with the Missing
Surface Inflection Hypothesis of Prévost and White (2000). It is
furthermore suggested that L2 learners initially associate morphological agreement
with verb-raising and, thus, acquire forms of be before inflectional
morphology on in situ thematic verbs.
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