How Second Languages are Learned An Introduction

The syntax of early second language (L2) utterances is examined and how it develops over time. Topics covered are sentential negation, verb movement, question formation, relative clause interpretation and agreement between nouns and adjectives and nouns and determiners. The syntactic rules Merge, Move and Agree are introduced and there is discussion of the role of innate linguistic predispositions, first language influence and input in the development of L2 syntax.