Publication Date
2018
Abstract
Second language acquisition researchers and teachers have long suspected that even though learners with plenty of target language exposure vary in their production of inflectional morphemes such as regular past tense and third person singular –s (the only agreement suffix in English), they do know these forms. Researchers ask why learners don’t invariably produce these forms if they know them. But do they really know them? To answer these questions, we need to ask what it means to “know” (have acquired) an inflectional morpheme. Under current thinking, a learner’s knowledge of morphological forms marking tense and agreement is connected to the abstract syntactic features they represent. As noted in other chapters in this volume (e.g. chapters 2 and 4 by Caink, and by Gil et al. respectively), in generative, Chomskyan, linguistics, human languages share a common core of syntactic principles, and differences among languages revolve around language-specific mental lexicons. The lexicon of a language contains the semantic, phonological, morphological and syntactic properties of lexical categories such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and prepositions and functional categories such as negation, tense, aspect and agreement.
Journal or Book Title
Mind Matters in SLA
Comments
Published as: The Mystery of the Missing Inflections Walid Kahoul, Anne Vainikka, Martha Young-Scholten 2018. In Clare Wright, T. Piske and Martha Young-Scholten (Eds.) Mind Matters in SLA. Multilingual Matters: Bristol.