Functional Categories in Child L2 Acquisition of French

Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994; in press) argued that adult language learners initially project verb phrases and that subsequent projection of functional categories is input driven, with inflectional phrases emerging before complementizer phrases. They assumed that the same is true for first-language acquisition (Clahsen, Eisenbeiss, and Vainikka (1994)). On this account, one would expect child second language (L2) learners to lack functional categories in the early stages of language learning. In this article, we argue against this position using data drawn from a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous production data from two English-speaking children who started attending French kindergarten at age 5. Our data suggest that functional categories and their projections are present in the earliest utterances available. Relevant data include the productive use of determiners, inflection, case marking, subject clitics, wh-questions, and correct negative placement. Changes were largely quantitative rather than qualitative in both children, with no radical shifts in the grammar as regards functional projections. These data do not support the claim for a purely lexical stage in child L2 acquisition.