Many recent publications have focused on problems operating at the lexical level in second language acquisition (SLA), which itself was the consequence of an overwhelming emphasis on grammar research in the past and a corresponding neglect of vocabulary. It seems however that the whole movement of language awareness in the area of applied linguistics and language pedagogy has revived an interest in grammatical issues in language acquisition and learning. Also, SLA research has shown that lexical development does not occur on its own but interacts and overlaps with the morphosyntactic development of a learner. This has entailed a growing need for more research in this area of language acquisition.

The present volume aims to make a serious contribution to this developing field. It consists of chapters on various issues relating to the morphosyntactic development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such as Polish, Greek and Turkish. In addition, it highlights areas which one might expect to be especially transfer-prone not only at the level of interlingual transfer but also at the intralingual level.

The chapters in the first part of the volume 'Studies on ESL/EFL Morphosyntactic Development' report on empirical studies on word morphology and sentence patterns, and also look at the interface of lexis and grammar in the discourse and syntactic processing of foreign language learners. Odlin's chapter is an overview of theories and research on focus constructions in L2 acquisition from a pragmatic and psycholinguistic perspective. It also discusses the crosslinguistic influences observed in focus constructions, as produced in written texts. A corpus-based study presented by Callies also looks at the written production of a bilingual and compares it with native speakers' written discourse in terms of clause syntactic operations and, more precisely, tough- constructions ( to- constructions with such words as difficult , easy , hard and impossible ).