Missing Inflection And The Impairment Of Interlanguage Grammar

It is a striking property that second language learners (L2ers) use inflectional marking sometimes, but omit it at other times. Moreover, this phenomenon of morphological variability seems to be persistent in the whole process of second language acquisition (L2A). The question is whether L2ers'persistent morphological problems imply the impairment of interlanguage syntactic system. The present research aims to examine the morphological/syntactic impairment debate in recent years and to explore the potential relationship between morphology and syntax in L2 by investigating L2ers'knowledge of finiteness within the theoretical framework of the Minimalist Program. Both the case study and the cross-sectional study with the participants of Chinese-speaking English learners show that L2ers distinguish finiteness from nonfiniteness despite their frequent omission of affixal inflection from thematic verbs. Firstly, they show an asymmetric use of finite and nonfinite verbs. Secondly, they correctly place thematic verbs on the right of negators, VP-adverbs and stranded quantifiers in finite clauses, and in questions they do not raise thematic verbs to C. Thirdly, they provide overt nominative subjects for nearly all the finite clauses. Especially, they have the awareness of using English expletives there and it, which are the exclusive checkers of the strong EPP feature of English finite T. And finally, few agreement errors occur when the agreement marking relavant to the functional category T appears. All above indicate that L2ers have the knowledge of English finiteness despite their frequent omission of inflection from thematic verbs. The infinitival verbs in finite clauses, in fact, serve as the default forms of finite verbs. Therefore, the functional category of T is present in L2, its associated features and the Agr- and Case-checking mechanisms function well. That is, interlanguage syntactic system is unimpaired. The experimental results also show that L2ers consistently provide the suppletive inflection, even tend to overuse it, although they omit the affixal verbal inflection at a high rate. This...