Actually, I could justifiably end my review here. Lydia White has come out with a new textbook on Universal Grammar (UG) and SLA; buy it. End of story. Still, I have 724 words left, so for those readers whose SLA research has been conducted on a different planet, let me pad things out a bit.

In the short history of empirical research in SLA, UG-oriented research has been one research program—I am tempted to say, the only one—that has consistently situated itself within the discipline of cognitive science, in that it has sought to explain the cognitive capacities of second language (L2) learners in light of a coherent and well-developed theory of the human language faculty. White has been at the forefront of this research program from its inception and has been perhaps the most productive contributor to that program.

This volume manages to cover a surprisingly wide selection of that literature, but it is not one of those Jones-says-this-whereas-Smith-says-that-but-more-research-is-necessary kinds of surveys that occasionally escape from their proper place in doctoral dissertations. Rather, White's book is a critically evaluative analysis of the major questions facing SLA research. I stress the “critically”: Although quite properly objective, White is, thankfully, not neutral.

Chapter 1 is a brief overview of the logical problem of language acquisition and of UG as a proposed solution and of the idea of “access to UG” in SLA. (This book is not, it should be noted, an introduction to UG theory and indeed presupposes a certain familiarity with that theory.) Still, White keeps discussion at a level that should be accessible to, say, any graduate student in an SLA—rather than TESOL—program. Chapter 2 examines whether interlanguage (IL) grammars are constrained by UG principles; White chooses a couple of intriguingly subtle phenomena (the overt pronoun constraint and the result-process distinction in nominals) to suggest that IL grammars are indeed so constrained. At the same time, she looks closely at evidence that second language (L2) learners may produce “wild” grammars. She makes a strong, although necessarily not compelling, case for “saving the phenomena.”

Chapter 3 deals with the vexed question of the initial state of the adult learner at the beginning of L2 acquisition—one place where the SLA waters seem to have been unduly muddied. White explicates and compares the various proposals—the first language (L1) as initial state, UG itself as initial state, UG plus the L1, some sort of UG-with-deficits, and so on—and expertly guides the reader through both the empirical evidence and the conceptual or theoretical issues. This latter discussion is typical of the book's transcending of mere reportage and will be welcomed especially by any reader who, like me, finds some of the proposals to be just, well, weird.

Chapter 4 is about parameters and whether they can be reset in conformity with the L2. Discussion here centers on empirical questions, perhaps because, as White seems to suggest at the end of the chapter, the nature of parameters themselves in linguistic theory is rather unclear. Chapter 5 is concerned with the transition-theoretical aspect of SLA—the question of how input can trigger changes in the IL grammar. This is perhaps the least satisfying chapter in the book, but then the topic is perhaps the least satisfying domain of SLA research, where proposals and results are both thin on the ground. Yet, White still manages to provide a useful elucidation of the problem, perhaps the first in the general SLA literature (I second White's recommendation to consult Carroll, 2001, for an ambitious proposal on input in SLA).

Chapters 6 and 7 take us into areas often considered “semantic,” such as inflectional morphology, psych verbs, or the English dative alternation. Those readers (who seem to be legion) who think of UG as something relevant only to a small core of abstract syntactic structures would do well to read the discussion here, which gives a good account of the complexities of the issues and the sophistication of the analyses recently offered, miles away from the morpheme studies of yore. Chapter 8 addresses the seemingly widespread failure to converge on a nativelike grammar. All chapters include helpful references for further reading and “Topics for Discussion” that are actually interesting and thought provoking.

White writes, as always, with authority and lucidity, and the result is a magisterial introduction to SLA as a function of the language faculty.