Abstract

This thesis seeks to empirically examine six contemporary theories of

language acquisition by considering the acquisition of French word order
by instructed English speaking learners.
French and English differ in terms of surface word order with respect
to negation, adverbs and object clitics. These differences are shown in the
table below.

Structure
S-V-Neg-X
S-aux-Neg-V-X
S-Neg-V-X
S-V-Adv-X
S-Adv-V-X
S-Cl/Pro-V
S-V-Cl/Pro

French
elle ne regarde pas la tele
*elle nest pas regarder la tele
*elle ne pas regarde la tele
elle regarde souvent la tele
*elle souvent regarde la tele
elle la regarde
*elle regarde la

English
*she watches not TV
she is not watching TV
*she not watches TV
* she watches often TV
she often watches TV
*she it watches
she watches it

Table 1: Word order differences between French and English

Pollock (1989) argues that these different word orders are due to one
single parametric difference between the two languages - namely verb
placement. Negation, adverbs and clitics are in fixed positions in the
underlying structure. In French the verb undergoes movement whereas in
English it does not. The difference between the two languages is argued
to be the result of French having a strong uninterpretable Tense feature
which requires verbs to move whereas English does not (Chomsky & Lasnik, 1995, Lasnik, 2007). The learnability issue for the English speaking
L2 learner of French is acquiring this different Tense feature.
In this thesis I will investigate the acquisition of these structures
(negation, adverbs and object clitics) to investigate potential parameter re-setting. This study seeks to empirically test between three theories
of the Initial State of L2 acquisition and three theories of L2 development. The Initial State theories tested are Minimal Trees/Organic Grammar (Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1996, 2005), Full Transfer/Full Access
(Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) and Modulated Structure Building (Hawkins,
2001). These three theories all make different empirically testable predictions about the level of L1 transfer and the underlying structure of the

Initial State. The theories of development tested are the Missing Surface
Inflection Hypothesis (Prevost & White, 2000), Representational Deficit
Hypothesis (Hawkins & Chan, 1997) and Feature Reassembly (Lardiere,
2008). Again these theories make different predictions concerning possible
parameter re-setting in L2 French. This study is therefore framed by the
following research questions:
A. What is the initial state in L2 learners of French?
B. How do functional features develop in these learners?
C. What is the role of the L1 feature settings in this development?
I examine data from five groups of 15 instructed English speaking
learners of French who have all been taught in the British school and
university system. The beginner group (aged 12-13) has received one
year of instruction, the low-intermediate group (aged 15-16) have had
four years, the high-intermediate (aged 17-18) have received 6 years of
instruction. The low-advanced group (aged 19-20) are in their second
year of an undergraduate French degree and the high-advanced group
(aged 21-23) are in their final year of undergraduate study and spent at
least 5 months in a French speaking country. Ten native speaker controls
were also tested.
Results from two elicited oral production tasks, a comprehension task
and an acceptability judgement task are presented and the theories of the
Initial State and development mentioned above are evaluated in light of
these results. The results show significant levels of L1 transfer in the Initial
State and a gradual development of sentence structure. I argue that these
results provide evidence against Full Transfer/Full Access and Organic
Grammar and in support of Modulated Structure Building. In terms of
development there are significant correlations between the use of verb
raising with negation, adverb placement, object clitics and subject clitics
for both the oral production task and the judgement task. This would
support the view that parameter re-setting is possible supporting Feature
Reassembly and counter Representational Deficit Hypothesis. There is
also partial support for the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis but

further research is required.

This thesis concludes that parameter re-setting is possible for instructed
English speaking learners of French. However, learners build their syntactic representation gradually and transfer their knowledge of English at
each stage before re-setting the parameter to the French values.