The L2 Basic Variety as an I-language

The Basic Variety, as defined by Klein and Perdue (this volume), is understood as an instantiation of the essential properties of the human language capacity, and although, as the ‘initial fossilization point’ of adult second language acquisition, it lacks crucial features of fully fledged languages, the claim is that the BV is a natural language in the sense that it is constrained by principles of Universal Grammar (UG). In this discussion I raise a few points which may cast some doubt on the claim that the BV is an I-language. At the core of this debate, as far as (morpho)syntactic issues are concerned, one finds the problem of determining the role of functional categories in BV grammar. Crucially, in L2 acquisition in general and in the BV in particular, one does not find the same kind of developmental relation between the acquisition of overt inflectional morphology and word order patterns as is evidenced in L1 development. I conclude that neither UG nor the universal component of the language faculty, as envisaged by Klein and Perdue, can account adequately for the essential properties of L2 interlanguages, including the BV. One important reason is that, rather than relying on structure-dependent operations, as in L1 development, L2 learners resort to strategies referring to sequential ordering of surface strings. If this is correct, L2 varieties are a mix of both UG-constrained and non-grammatical cognitive processes.