The Role of Formal Features in Second Language Acquisition

Juana Liceras, Helmut Zobl, Helen Goodluck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780805853544
• eBook ISBN: 9781351540810
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Using Chomsky's minimalist program as a framework, this volume explores the role of formal (or functional) features in current descriptions and accounts of language acquistion. In engaging, up-to-date articles, distinguished experts examine the role of features in current versions of generative grammar and in learnibility theory as it relates to native, non-native, and impaired acquisition.

Part I
Linguistic Theory and Learnability

1.1. The role of features in syntactic theory and language variation

Lisa deMena Travis

Travis begins her chapter with a summary of the early use of features in the Minimalist Program, in which strong features triggered overt movement and weak features resulted in covert movement. She notes that the early Minimalist redescription of particular phenomena in feature terms was not, on the face of it, particularly explanatory. Travis then moves on to later Minimalist analyses in which the feature that needs to be checked is separated from the feature that triggers movement. She demonstrates how a feature system allows for the features to be treated as entities that are separate from the lexical items that introduce them. For example, partial wh-movement in German is seen as the result of the possibility of moving a wh-feature independently of the wh-phrase. As might be expected, given what we know about phrasal (XP) versus head (X) movement, feature movement is shown to be more restricted than movement of phrases. In the final section, Travis discusses whether the move to a feature-based system has led to unwarranted flexibility. Based on data from Malagasy and other languages, she argues that the greater power of the feature system may be justified insofar as it allows us to explain the combinatorial possibilities observed in language variation.

The Role of Features in Syntactic Theory and Language Variation

Lisa deMena Travis
McGill University

1. Introduction

Features are at the heart of recent Chomskyan syntactic theory and within this theory at the heart of language variation. Therefore, any study of language acquisition done within this framework is now a study of the acquisition of features. In Chomsky's 1995 book The Minimalist Program, he characterizes the unique property of human language (as opposed to formal languages) as the mismatch between the perception interface and the interpretive interface. If language were telepathic and did not have "to be accommodated to the human sensory and motor apparatus" (Chomsky 1995, p. 221), it might be truly minimal because there would be only one interface, the interpretative interface. Further, one would imagine that language would also be truly universal and, in such a scenario, language acquisition would be trivial. However, human language does need to accommodate the articulatory-perceptual interface. This interface not only creates a disparity with the interpretative interface, but it is also where language variation resides. In Chomsky's (1995) words,

This property of language might turn out to be one source of a striking departure from minimalist assumptions in language design: the fact that objects appear in the sensory output in positions "displaced" from those in which they are interpreted, under the most principled assumptions about interpretation. This is an irreducible fact about human language, expressed somehow in every contemporary theory of language, however the facts about displacement may be formulated. ... This displacement property reflects the disparity — in fact, complementarity — between morphology (checking of features) and theta-theory (assignment of semantic roles), (p. 222)

Given this view of language and language variation, the mismatch between the two interfaces is determined by features. The locus of language variation therefore is features, and the burden of language acquisition therefore is in the acquisition of features.¹

While, in the abstract, the task of the language acquisition researcher is clear, in practice there are two connected problems. One is that the details of not only the feature inventory but also the uses made of features are not clear. Related to this is the fact that both inventory and use of features shift from year to year and from researcher to researcher. In this chapter, I give some examples of which features are used and how. My aim is to outline the power and advantages of a feature system while remaining nevertheless cautious. Features allow us to view old processes in a new light, but when mishandled, they can lead to systems with little predictive power.

2. Features and Language Variation

The goal of this section of the chapter is to show how features have been used to capture language variation. First I give a bit of background from early Minimalism (e.g., Chomsky 1995, chapter 3) and focus on how features interact with a particular language parameter — overt movement. I briefly illustrate how this works with respect to movement of nominal projections (DPs) and verbs. I keep the discussion of the particular features at a fairly simple level. The purpose of this discussion is to give some background for a discussion of further changes in how features have been used within the Minimalist Program and how language variation (and ultimately the task of language learners) can be captured.

2.1. Categorial features: Strong versus weak

One important locus of language variation has been the component of the grammar in which movement occurr.² If movement occurs between D-structure and S-structure in a Government and Binding model (Chomsky, 1981), or previous to Spell-out in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995), then this movement is overt. Alternatively, movement could occur post-S-structure or post-Spell-out, in which case the movement is covert. Perhaps the most famous example of this is overt wh-movement in languages such as English versus covert wh-movement in languages such as Chinese (Huang, 1982). Here I will look at DP-movement of the subject, which is overt in English and arguably covert in Irish, and V-movement to T, which is overt in French and arguably covert in English.

2.1.1. Background on the use of features. The mismatch between the perceptual interface (PF) and the interpretative interface (LF) discussed above is due to displacement of elements, that is, movement. In the Minimalist Program, movement is triggered by features in the following manner. Any element that is not interpretable at either of these interface levels will cause the derivation to crash. This means that uninterpretable features must be eliminated before the derivation reaches the relevant interface. In an early version of the Minimalist Program, the difference between overt and covert movement was encoded in the strength of a feature. A strong feature triggered overt movement and a weak feature (along with the principle of Procrastinate) would ensure that the movement was covert. While current views of covert movement are quite varied, I explain the weak/strong system here to set up one use of features.

Strong features were assumed to be visible at PF (and LF) and weak features visible only at LF. The way that an uninterpretable feature is eliminated is by entering into a checking relation with an interpretable feature. Once checked, the uninterpretable feature is eliminated and the derivation is saved. In early Minimalism, checking relations were ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Linguistic theory and learnability
• Part II. Determiner phrase-related features
• Part III. Inflection phrase and aspect phrase-related features
• Part IV. Complementizer phrase-related features
• Author Index
• Subject Index