In recent research on primary (L1) and non-primary (L2) acquisition,special attention
has been given to whether syntactic development is subject to a continuity
condition. While it has been proposed that the continuity condition applies to both
L1 and L2 syntactic growth,the changes that take place in developing grammars have
sometimes been attributed to other cognitive systems. Specifically, it has been
proposed that child grammars are ‘underspecified’ because they
lack a pragmatic principle which determines the range of indices available for
establishing verbal and nominal coreference. According to this proposal, a grammar
which is underspecified for Number has null subjects and bare NPs only with
non-inflected verb forms. Assuming that adults will not have a pragmatic deficit of
the kind proposed for children, we have analysed data from child L1 Spanish and
adult L2 Spanish. The results of our analysis show that: (1) in child L1 Spanish,
the feature Person may encode Number so that when Person is distinctively
implemented, root infinitives and bare NP subjects will cease to occur. However, the
pervasive morphology of Spanish verbs conspires against the possibility of providing
clear-cut evidence for underspecification in the case of child Spanish; (2) the
different nature of L1 and L2 root infinitives may provide partial evidence for
underspecification in the case of L1 Spanish; and (3) in the case of L2 learners,
the distribution of null and overt subjects seems to be partially determined by
their L1 rather than by underspecification.
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