Reasons for wanting to read a handbook include looking for shortcuts to literature reviews, wanting to see what has changed in a field that is not currently a focus of one’s personal research, and wanting to find snapshots of important issues for presentation to students. This volume succeeds in providing material that supports all of these goals. Generally written at a level that requires a reasonable grounding in generative theory, it is a sustained reflection by a subfield of acquisition studies that sheds light not just on the conclusions—many of them subsequently revised—but on the methods of theory-driven investigation of language acquisition. Wasting little energy debunking nongenerative approaches to the same issues, most of the chapters reflect a warts-and-all honesty from individuals who have been in the field for a long time and who are not afraid to reveal past errors of thinking and analysis, to rethink conclusions in light of changing theoretical insights, and to identify issues that remain unsolved.
Hyams lays out the history of solutions for the robust phenomenon of missing subjects in early child language and addresses the possible influences of syntax, pragmatics, and processing to explain the data. Wexler’s discussion of the equally robust optional infinitive stage reviews the history of its investigation and argues for a growth rather than learning account that directly contrasts the input-driven probabilistic account of Yang, who explores the idea of input frequencies and of signature triggers for parameter setting in the subsequent chapter. Roeper and de Villiers try to mediate this debate in their introduction by reference to Kayne’s notion of microparameters and a call for a more detailed understanding of parametric space.
Deen’s chapter on the passive and Roeper and de Villier’s chapter on wh-questions reflect an abiding interest in what—in most formulations—are considered to be movement structures. Deen attempts to reconcile the late acquisition of passive structure in some languages with its early appearance in others, and Roeper and de Villiers review the acquisition of wh-questions, focusing on the logical properties of and constraints on movement by raising issues of landing sites, lexical specificity, principles of economy, and interpretation.
Issues of comprehension and interpretation form the focus of the final four chapters. Hamann considers the interpretation of reflexives and pronouns and the roles of syntax, pragmatics, and processing and acknowledges that things are much less clear than they used to be in the days of traditional binding theory. Sugisaki and Otsu, although less reflective, review an interesting series of experiments with children acquiring Japanese, which suggests early knowledge of a range of grammatical features indicative of Universal Grammar.
The last two chapters are concerned with the interpretation of sentences that involve quantification. Musolino explores how children understand the scope of quantified noun phrases and the extent to which processing—versus grammatical—explanations are called for, concluding that there is a greater role for processing explanations than used to be thought. Finally, in his review of the acquisition of universal quantification, Philip concludes that the basic knowledge is nonlinguistic and that how sentences represent it can be learned from positive input.
Throughout the volume, issues of processing and of pragmatics are addressed as they impact both (a) the way in which empirical work is conducted (and the conclusions that can be reached by adopting different experimental paradigms) and (b) the ways in which these processing and pragmatics issues have direct influence through such things as truncation, discourse identification of items in certain grammatical contexts, information structure options built into the syntax, and grammatical limitations on nonlinguistic interpretation. For the second language researcher it opens up a wide range of avenues for rethinking the traditional modular boundaries and for exploring how SLA can shed further light on those boundaries and on the nature of language acquisition itself.
Overall this excellent volume is marred only by some poor proofing and a seriously underpowered index. Its greatest contribution is articulated by Musolino, who closes his chapter with the following: “In the end, what matters most is not that we always find the right answers, but that we continue to try to ask interesting questions” (p. 346). This volume asks—and answers—a myriad of interesting and important questions that reveal the enormous complexity of the language acquisition task and of language itself, both of which, unfortunately, other approaches to language acquisition only too often fail to appreciate.
