Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar is a volume that has collected a total of nine conceptual and/or empirical chapters that look at adult third language (L3) or multilingual acquisition from the Universal Grammar (UG)/generative linguistic perspective. A variety of languages other than English are involved in the studies reported in the chapters, including Cantonese Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog and Thai, with acquisition cases taking place in a number of different geographical locations, such as Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Norway, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK, and the USA. Compared to its mother field of second language acquisition (SLA), which has flourished over the last 30 years, L3 acquisition is only a young field that is still very much in its infancy. Irrespective of theoretical framework, the number of studies on L3 is scant. This volume brings together some up-to-date research on adult L3 acquisition that borrows insights from previous descriptive studies on multilingualism particularly concerning the role of prior linguistic knowledge (Cenoz et al., 2000, 2001; see also Cook, 1996 on multicompetence), and follows the important field of generative SLA (White, 1989, 2003) to seek explanatory adequacy in (adult) non-native language acquisition research by adopting the UG framework (Flynn et al., 2004; Klein, 1995; Leung, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007b, 2008). For a more detailed proposal on combining multilingualism, descriptive L3 and generative SLA, see Leung (2007a). It is hoped that this volume will generate more interest in the study of L3 or multilingual acquisition from both the generative linguistic perspective and other theoretical perspectives. It is also hoped that this same volume will induce more dialogue and scholarly exchange between the fields of bi/multilingualism and SLA within academia. Undeniably the world is becoming more and more multilingual. We thus believe that this work is timely and of social relevance. The following section presents an overview of the chapters collected in this volume.

The chapters in this volume are presented in an alphabetical order based on the last names of the contributors.