| This study examines the interlanguage of six native speakers of Spanish learning English as a Second Language: two children, two adolescents and two adults. The purpose of the study was to determine whether there was evidence that any or all of these learners had access to a posited principle of Universal Grammar, the Morphological Uniformity Principle (MUP), formulated by Jaeggli and Safir, and parameter(s) posited as associated with that principle. The MUP states that only those languages which have uniform paradigms permit null subjects. Children learning English as their first language speak largely uniformly uninflected, null subject grammars, even though the adult language has irregularly inflected verbal paradigms and does not permit null subjects. This behavior in children suggests that they begin their language development with an underlying assumption of uniformity. As they discover that English is not a uniformly inflected language, they cease to use null subjects. A relationship between the emergence of pronominal subjects and inflection has been observed by Hyams and Jaeggli in children learning English as their first language, who are assumed to have their language development guided by the principles of Universal Grammar. In this study, the interlanguages of the six subjects were examined for evidence of this same correlation, and by implication, of access to UG. The results were that there was evidence that the two children and one of the adolescents had access to UG constrained acquisition, but no evidence that the two adults and the other adolescent had access to UG. Whether the two children and adolescent had access to the default setting of UG parameters, and therefore were learning an L-2 just as children learn an L-1, could not be determined, though there were suggestive evidence that this was the case. |
