Missing inflection in second language French: accidental infinitives and other verbal deficits

Abstract

This article re-examines the morphology/functional category debate in the light of empirical data drawn from the author’s longitudinal study of two intermediate learners of French as a second language (L2). It argues that inflectional deficits -which appear both as nonfinite verbs and as other morphological errors in the interlanguage data -support neither a codependence of syntax and morphology (Eubank, 1993/94) nor a gradual structure-building of L2 functional categories (Vainikka and Young-Scholten, 1998a, 1998b). The French data rather indicate that deficiencies in morphological mapping, not defective syntax (functional categories), are the cause of L2 failed inflection (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996; Lardière, 1998). The data also support the claim that L2 morpholexical characteristics - the most prone to cross-linguistic variation - are more difficult to master than syntactic differences (Herschensohn, 2000). The first section reviews the theoretical issues, discussing the morphology/functional category link in L1 and then in L2 acquisition. The second section presents relevant data on infinitival forms and other errors from the author’s study. The third section discusses the data, arguing that the infinitival forms of intermediate grammars are not ‘root infinitives’ such as those seen in early stages of L1 acquisition, but rather examples of defective inflection.