A number of studies in the research literature have proposed that Universal Grammar
(UG) is partially available to adult second language learners. Attempts to provide a
syntactic characterization of that partial availability have only recently begun to
appear, however. In this article we will argue that speakers of Chinese (a language
without wh-operator movement in overt syntax) learning second language
English (a language with wh-operator movement in overt syntax) establish
mental representations for English which involve pronominal binding rather than
operator movement. It will be suggested that this divergence from native-speaker
representations is an effect of the inaccessibility of features of functional
categories in second language acquisition, what we will refer to as the
‘failed functional features hypothesis’. Implications are drawn
from the findings for the syntactic characterization of accessibility to UG more
generally in second language acquisition.
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