This chapter revisits earlier work by Pam Peters and Peter Collins on colloquial Australian English in the World Atlas of Varieties of English (WAVE). Forty two morphosyntactic WAVE features were extracted from the blogs section of the 1.9 billion-word Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE) and analysed, with a view to achieving a superior level of empirical reliability than was possible in the earlier study, limited as it was to evidence from small ‘gappy’ corpora supplemented where necessary by impressionistic judgements. The scope of the earlier study is also broadened, through the introduction of an intervarietal perspective which compares Australian English with British, American, Irish and New Zealand English, and through the adoption of an onomasiological methodology that systematically compares frequencies for the non-standard features with those of their standard counterparts. The findings challenge the stereotype of Australian speakers as uniquely ‘laid back’ in their use of English. It emerged that American speakers, not Australian, were the most prolific users of the non-standard colloquial features investigated, be they broadly acceptable or socially stigmatised.

This chapter provides an overview of major theoretical approaches to morphosyntax in second language acquisition. The chapter starts with an overview of major data collection measures that are used to study morphosyntactic phenomena, including production data, judgment data, and online tasks, self-paced reading in particular. The applications and limitations of the different data collection measures are addressed. The chapter subsequently considers the debate between representational deficit approaches vs. missing surface inflection approaches to difficulties with inflectional morphology in the second language, examining these approaches in the domain of verbal inflection. The chapter then moves on to approaches that consider feature reassembly and morphological (in)congruency and discusses studies in these two frameworks in the domain of number marking on nominals. The chapter concludes with a summary and suggestions for future research.

The poverty of the stimulus in the domain of language refers to the gap between the knowledge of grammar attained and the knowledge that could be deduced on the basis of the available linguistic input. Within the Generative Enterprise, the notion of the poverty of the stimulus plays a critical role in the motivation for positing Universal Grammar, a set of innate cognitive principles restricting the range of possible human grammars. This chapter first considers the poverty of the stimulus in the acquisition of native language and then turns to the poverty of the stimulus in the acquisition of nonnative language; both sections review a number of empirical studies documenting language acquisition under conditions of a poverty of the stimulus. For nonnative language, examples are drawn from research on morphosyntax, the syntax-semantics interface, and phonology. These studies reveal that nonnative learners (can) come to acquire subtle linguistic properties which could not be deduced (i) from their native-language grammar, (ii) from the Target Language input available to them or (iii) from classroom instruction.

Heritage language speakers are second language (L2) speakers of a sociopolitically majority language. Their native heritage language is a minority language which typically develops under linguistic pressure from the majority L2 and eventually becomes secondary and weaker than the L2. In the past decade, research on heritage language speakers has investigated the degree of acquisition of different aspects of the heritage grammar and how the process and outcome of heritage language acquisition are similar to and different from adult L2 acquisition. Advances in the acquisition of heritage languages have contributed significantly to inform key questions in L2 acquisition. This chapter discusses the latest research on how L2 learners’ and heritage speakers’ exposure and use of the L2 and L1 affect the processing and acquisition the L2 and the heritage language and points to areas in need of further research.

This chapter will introduce the reader to the study of third (L3) or further (Ln) acquisition. The circumstances surrounding the acquisition of language beyond the second conspire to make this a unique context, distinct from L2 acquisition. The L3 learner has at least partial knowledge of more than one grammar, previous experience with nonnative language learning and, in most cases, at least some metalinguistic knowledge. All these factors significantly condition both the starting point and the trajectory of L3/Ln language acquisition in ways that cannot be predicted from our understanding of L1 and L2 acquisition and reflect qualitative as well as quantitative changes in going from two to three or more languages. In this chapter, the reader will find an introduction to the basic concepts and themes of L3/Ln acquisition research, an overview of L3/Ln theories from a cognitive perspective – modeling the acquisition of both morphosyntax and phonology – an in-depth discussion of the role of previously acquired languages, and a brief introduction to some of the most recent work on L3 processing, including studies using electroencephalography (EEG) and semiartificial languages to address long-standing questions in the field while overcoming some of the most common methodological and logistic issues facing the L3/Ln researcher.

This chapter takes ideas from Vainikka and Young-Scholten’s chapter in the Handbook’s first edition (2013) on stages in the acquisition of L2 morphosyntax. Complementing this second edition chapter is Chapter 16, with its focus on the development of reading and writing by adult migrants with little or no literacy in their home language(s). This chapter applies ideas presented in the 2013 chapter to research on non-/low-literate adults to explore whether literacy influences their acquisition of morphosyntax. It provides an overview of key studies, of the L2 acquisition of migrant adults, both cross-sectional and longitudinal, over the decades that such research was prevalent. The focus of the chapter is application of two stage-based theories of L2 morphosyntax development, Organic Grammar and the Basic Variety. With these theories in mind, we discuss analyses of oral production data from adult migrants acquiring English and Italian, respectively. The results reveal learners’ use of unanalyzed chunks which rather than implicating literacy seems to implicate developmental stage.

The Channel Islands (Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark) are situated off the coast of Normandy (France), west of the Cotentin peninsula. A brief look at a map shows that, from a geographical point of view, they are much closer to France than to England. As the original language in these islands is a form of Norman French, they have traditionally been regarded in dialectology as a French-speaking area. However, the exclusive interest of traditional dialectology in Channel Islands French is not an adequate reflection of the current linguistic situation. Today, English is clearly the dominant language in the Channel Islands. The number of speakers of Norman French is rather small and steadily decreasing. Over the past 200 years, English has gained more and more influence and has gradually replaced the local Norman French dialects. Indeed, there are clear indications that they will become extinct in the not-too-distant future.

The functional-typological approach to language recognizes that language features are shaped by functional forces: the strengths and limitations of human cognition and perception in creative tension with communitive needs. The results of this tension are evident in the phonology as well as in the morphosyntax. A functional-typological understanding of language reveals what features are likely to be common to different languages, as well as what features are likely to co-occur in the same language. This predictive knowledge prepares the teacher for what she will encounter in students L1, and helps her prepare students for what they will encounter in L2. Awareness of typologically less common features in particular will help the teacher to know where special effort may be needed to help students meet the challenge. An understanding of functional forces such as iconicity, metaphorical extension and language change also allows the L2 teacher to explain how a particular feature is motivated and not merely arbitrary, helping the learner to see how those facts make sense and thereby making them easier to learn.

Two different languages may make use of the same grammatical categories, such as number or tense, but one language may make distinctions within that category that the other does not, or express those distinctions with more complex coding than the other. It is even possible that a grammatical category expressed in one language is entirely absent from the other. Second language learning thus requires a comparative approach. The learner must understand the rules and structures in both L1 and L2 order to identify how the languages differ from each other. This requires a “metalanguage” for thinking and speaking about language structure. An understanding of basic morphosyntactic concepts provides just such a metalanguage. Using comparative case studies with data from English, Spanish, German, and Norwegian, this chapter demonstrates the usefulness for second language learning of morphosyntactic concepts such as tense, modality, aspect, finite, infinitive, participle, imperfective, past prospective, gerund, nominalization, definite, indefinite, reflexive, modifier, argument, constituent, complement, dependent clause, relative clause, conjunction, and subordinator.

The Old English poem Beowulf is a particularly valuable source of information about early features of the English language. In its present form the poem is recorded in a manuscript of unknown provenance made, in all probability, shortly after the millennium. Yet it evinces linguistic features that are highly conservative, suggesting that the extant text was copied, perhaps directly, from a much older exemplar, and that the poem was composed in a more northerly dialect than the Late West Saxon one in which it is preserved. Some of the poem’s conservative linguistic features are detectable only on the basis of poetic meter. Other of the poem’s archaic features include some that are orthographic in nature: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and metrical. Beowulf is not the only linguistically conservative poem preserved in Old English, but in many ways it reveals, more than any other poem, a great deal about what the language was like at a much earlier time than that at which all but a minuscule portion of the total extant corpus of Old English was recorded. It is thus an invaluable window on the prehistory of the English language.