The L2 acquisition of Spanish: generative perspectives
The present issue is devoted to recent research on the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish within the generative tradition. The articles collected in this issue were originally presented at two conferences: Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition and the Colloquium on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese, held at McGill University in Montreal in May and November 1997, respectively. The focus on Spanish as a second language is part of a growing trend towards investigating L2s other than English. Most generative L2 studies in the early 1980s focused on English as the target language, and to a lesser extent German (e.g. Clahsen and Muysken, 1986). With the exception of Juana Liceras’s early studies on the acquisition of relative clauses (Liceras, 1986) and the pro-drop parameter (Liceras, 1988; 1989), L2 Spanish was not investigated within this framework. The predominance of English was largely due to the fact that English was also the most in-depth and widely studied language within generative linguistics. However, as different crosslinguistic phenomena began to be examined in the context of linguistic theory, this laid the foundation for subsequent crosslinguistic interests in language acquisition. Understanding how other languages work and how they are acquired is fundamental to theories of linguistic competence that assume a role for Universal Grammar. Theoretical claims about the nature of language and the language acquisition process should hold true of any language and need to be tested on as many different languages as possible. The more languages we look at, the more precise our theories and predictions become. The study of Spanish and its acquisition makes an important contribution to the