文档介绍：To appear in W. Ritchie & T. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition.
Emerald Press.
Emergentism and Second Language Acquisition*
William O’Grady, Miseon Lee, & Hye-Young Kwak
1. Introduction
Language presents us with many puzzles. Why does it have the particular
properties that it does? Why does it vary and change in certain ways, but not
others? How is it acquired so quickly and with so little effort by pre-school
children despite its plexity? And why is the acquisition of a second
language so difficult for adults, despite their intellectual sophistication and their
access to carefully designed educational programs?
An attractive feature of approaches to language based on Universal Grammar
(UG) is that they offer an integrated account of these puzzles—an inborn system
of grammatical categories and principles gives language its defining properties,
places limits on the ways in which it can vary and change, and explains how even
the plex phenomena are acquired with such ease by children. With the
help of additional assumptions, it even appears possible to offer insights into why
the acquisition of a second language proves so challenging.
Yet the UG-based program has encountered deep suspicion and resistance
from many quarters during the half century that it has dominated explanatory
work on language. For a significant segment of the professional linguistic
community, it simply does not ring true. The objections vary with the
commentator—UG principles are too abstract (Tomasello 2003:3-7), the type of
nativism that UG seems to presuppose is biologically implausible (Elman et al.
1996, MacWhinney 2000), a focus on faculty-specific principles distances the
study of language from the rest of cognitive science (Jackendoff 1988, 2002:xi-
xii), the phenomena purportedly accounted for by UG theories are better
explained in other ways (Hawkins 2004, O’Grady 2005, Haspelmath to appear),
and