As noted by one of the contributors to this Festschrift volume, Lydia White is widely regarded as the ostensible mother of research in SLA from a generative linguistics perspective. This volume consists of an introduction and 14 chapters edited and written by McGill University alumni who have studied with White. The collection covers an impressive range of topics, mostly in generative SLA, in various linguistic domains including phonology, morphosyntax, lexical and formal semantics, the syntax-discourse/pragmatics interface, and language processing. There are also chapters on first language (L1) acquisition, third language acquisition, bilingualism, and language attrition among heritage language speakers.
The volume is organized into three thematic sections—learnability and parameter setting, variability, and incomplete ultimate attainment—although these categories contain a fair amount of overlap. Space limitations preclude more than the very briefest of chapter sketches, but readers can, nonetheless, grasp the range of linguistic phenomena investigated.
The first two chapters in Part 1—by Hirakawa and Inagaki, respectively—investigate knowledge of verb argument structure among native Japanese speakers acquiring English (and English speakers acquiring Japanese in Inagaki's paper). Hirakawa tests competing theoretical accounts of so-called passive errors with unaccusative verbs (e.g., John was arrived late), whereas Inagaki tests subset-principle-driven predictions for the acquisition of manner-of-motion verbs with locational versus directional interpretations. Slabakova's chapter investigates a classic poverty-of-the-stimulus learnability problem—specifically, whether adult native speakers of English acquiring Italian know that one of two possible interpretations available in English for bare plural nouns is unavailable in Italian, in the absence of relevant classroom instruction or any other positive (or negative) evidence. The final two chapters in Part 1 explore issues of L1 transfer, which is confirmed as playing an important role in adult SLA. The chapter by Grüter and Conradie experimentally tests predictions of various extent-of-transfer theories in the interpretation of wh-questions in initial-state second language (L2) German by native speakers of English (a non-V2 language) versus native speakers of Afrikaans (a V2 language, like German). Their results support a full transfer position (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). In the chapter by Pater and Tessier, L1 transfer is also shown to play an important role in the acquisition of phonological alternations in a miniature artificial language; in this study, a phonological alternation that provided an epenthetic repair to minimal word violations in English (the participants' native language) was easier to acquire than a formally comparable rule with no corresponding phonotactic purpose.
The chapters in Part 2 focus on aspects of variability—a prominent and persistent characteristic of adult SLA. In the first two chapters in this section, Prévost and Leung, respectively, investigate variability in the production of inflectional morphology and conclude that L1 morphosyntactic properties might partially account for inflectional variability in the L2. The chapter by Steele tests the acquisition of new segmental contrasts in prosodically weak positions by native English- or Mandarin-speaking learners of French and finds that the less featurally complex member of the contrast is acquired earlier. The study by Juffs argues for the primacy of L1 influence rather than working-memory capacity to account for variability in the L2 processing of English reduced relative clauses.
The chapter by Allen stands out as the only one in the volume concerned primarily with L1 acquisition, and that from a primarily functional rather than formal perspective. Despite an unfortunate caricature of Chomsky's view of language acquisition as “essentially untouched by the environment to which children are exposed” (p. 233; but see the Chomsky [1986, pp. 2–4] reference cited here by Allen for a refutation of this view), this chapter succeeds in showing how different theoretical approaches to young children's omission of subjects provide complementary coverage of different aspects of the data.
Finally, the four chapters in Part 3 address incomplete or failed aspects of L2 attainment. Gürel and Valenzuela, respectively, suggest that L1 transfer appears to permanently constrain interpretive possibilities within the L2—the ability to determine pronominal coreference in L2 Turkish in Gürel's chapter and permanently diminished sensitivity to the specificity of topicalized elements in L2 Spanish in Valenzuela's chapter. In the last two chapters, Bruhn de Garavito and Montrul, respectively, both compare early and late (L2) bilingual groups on various aspects of knowledge of L2 Spanish, with implications for age-related or maturational theories such as the critical period hypothesis. The study by Bruhn de Garavito also tests the predictions of competing models of SLA—specifically, emergentist/connectionist versus (different) nativist proposals regarding the acquisition of constraints on dative clitic doubling in Spanish.
Readers seeking theoretical convergence among the profusion of (occasionally conflicting or inconclusive) findings amassed here might come up a bit dazed. The editors emphasize the collection's “theoretical and methodological diversity” (p. 10), and more of an effort on their part to connect the dots in terms of overall conclusions or future directions would have been useful (e.g., the persistence of L1 influence is a recurring theme that emerges from many chapters). However, this volume is unmatched in terms of presenting a wide range of innovative experiments designed to isolate and empirically test specific predictions of linguistic and language acquisition theory among (mainly) adult language learners. The study of formal linguistic analysis and its predictions and implications for acquisition is a hallmark of White's own intellectual approach to SLA research, and that rich legacy is amply reflected in this volume.
