The notion of syntactic transfer has long been controversial, and empirical studies of second language syntax have fueled much of the debate (Sections 2.1, 2.2). Despite the apparent absence of cross-linguistic influence in some studies, however, there is considerable evidence for positive transfer involving articles and other syntactic structures (Section 3.2). There is also evidence for negative transfer in cases such as the Hiberno-English verb phrase seen in He's after telling a lie (Sections 2.1, 3.2). And a great deal of evidence has also been found for syntactic transfer (both positive and negative) in studies of word order, relative clauses, and negation. An extended look at research in those three areas is appropriate for several reasons. First, the number of studies in those areas is rather large. Second, several studies have involved target languages other than English. Third, such work is related in important ways to work in other areas of linguistics, such as discourse analysis and syntactic typology. Finally, many of the studies indicate that transfer interacts with other factors in acquisition.

Word order

Word order has been one of the most intensively studied syntactic properties in linguistics, and in second language acquisition research there are now numerous studies of learners' word-order patterns. The study of second language word order has been useful not only for a better understanding of transfer but also for an understanding of discourse, syntactic typology, and other factors affecting second language acquisition.