This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learners acquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectional morphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship as well as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressed by a pattern like "the man is go".…

From a consideration of variability in language-learner and language-user data, the concept of proficiency is considered in relation to models of second and foreign language learning. Proficiency is defined in relation to four separate dimensions: grammatical well-formedness, speech-act rules, functional elaboration, and code diversity. This…

This paper focuses on the mechanism by which the successful learner acquires a second language. The author postulates a core language, the common core of the speaker's native and target languages, and states that the second language becomes an extension of this common core. Whatever language-specific features are added while acquiring the second…