Although a growing number of second language acquisition (SLA) studies take linguistic complexity as a dependent variable, the term is still poorly defined and often used with different meanings, thus posing serious problems for research synthesis and knowledge accumulation. This article proposes a simple, coherent view of the construct, which is…

Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) argue that all speakers -- regardless of whether monolingual or bilingual -- have multiple grammars in their mental language representations. They further claim that this simple assumption can explain many things: optionality in second language (L2) language behaviour, multilingualism, language…

Optionality is a central phenomenon in second language acquisition (SLA), for which any adequate theory must account. Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) offer an appealing approach to it, using Roeper's Multiple Grammars Theory, which was created with first language in mind but which extends very naturally to SLA. They include…

This article clarifies some ideas presented in this issue's keynote article (Amaral and Roeper, this issue) and discusses several issues raised by the contributors' comments on the nature of the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory. One of the key goals of the article is to unequivocally state that MG is not a parametric theory and that its…

This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal…

There has been considerable research that investigates whether reflexives in interlanguage grammars (ILGs) are constrained by Principle A of the Binding Theory. These earlier studies focused on the role of sentence type, including both finite and non-finite test sentences; they did not examine the role of antecedent type, namely distinguishing…

This article investigates verb placement, especially Verb second (V2), in post-puberty second language (L2) learners of two closely related Germanic V2 languages: Swedish and German. Hakansson, "et al." (2002) have adduced data from first language (L1) Swedish-speaking learners of German in support of the claim that the syntactic property of V2…

In this article, we argue against the Representational Deficit Hypothesis, according to which second language (L2) speakers can never acquire functional categories or features that are absent in the first language (L1), suggesting that fossilization is inevitable. Instead, we support the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, which argues that the ultimate…

Researchers who assume that Universal Grammar (UG) plays a role in second language (L2) acquisition are still debating whether L2 learners have access to UG in its entirety (the Full Access hypothesis; e.g. Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994; 1996; White, 1989; 2003) or only to those aspects of UG that are instantiated in their first language (L1) grammar…

We discuss the results of an experiment that investigates English-French learners' interpretation of quantifiers with detachable restrictions. Such quantifiers are ungrammatical in English. We investigate aspects of interpretation that rely on a highly idiosyncratic interface between grammar and general principles of conversational cooperation in…