L2 acquisition of English synthetic compounding is not constrained by level-ordering (and neither, probably, is L1 )

Abstract

This article investigates the acquisition of English synthetic compounding by native Spanish and native Chinese speakers. Data are presented which con tradict the claim by Gordon (1985), Clahsen (1991) and Clahsen et al. (1992) that morphological level-ordering is universally, innately available to lan guage learners to guide their acquisition of compounding constraints. Empirical arguments are given which show that compounding, at least, can not be universally subject to the particular inflectional constraints - namely, a restriction on plurals in compounds - imposed by the level-ordering mod els cited in the above acquisition studies. I also present additional experi mental results which demonstrate that L2 learners of English freely violate this restriction, and that such violations reflect particular L1 influence. I suggest an alternative approach to analysing the role of Universal Grammar in the acquisition of compounding which better accounts for both the L1 and L2 English data, by considering 1) the interaction of syntactic principles with lexical derivation; 2) the parametric differences between the L1 and L2; and 3) the language-specific nature of morphological affixation.