Tense and verb raising in advanced L2 French

Two UG approaches to L2A propose different views of parameter resetting, depending on the capacity of interlanguage grammars to gain new values for uninterpretable functional features. Representational Deficit/Interpretability (e.g. Hawkins, 2003) maintains that parameter settings are limited to L1 values, whereas Full Access (e.g. Prevost & White, 2000) claims L2 parameter values may be gained; both assume initial transfer of L1 morphosyntactic settings. We examine verb morphosyntax of three advanced anglophone learners of L2 French, beginning with a description of the theoretical issues. We next report the study: the subjects, data collection and results. The final section discusses the data in terms of the two approaches, concluding that the results generally support FA over RD/I.

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