Morphological variation in early adult second language French.

This paper investigates the nature of root infinitives (RIs) produced by adult L2 learners in a corpus of L2 French data from 21 English-speaking adults at the beginner and intermediate levels. Although the production of RIs varies across learners, the results show that infinitival verbs appear in contexts requiring the projection of functional categories (e.g. with clitic subjects and in CPs). Moreover, most RIs have a declarative reading, only a few have a modal interpretation. This suggests that adult learners have knowledge of finiteness features and that they may experience problems supplying the exact inflectional morphology (see Lardiere 2000), regardless of the clause-type in which the verb appears. This also corroborates findings from longitudinal studies (Prévost 2003a) and contrasts with L2 French data from anglophone children (Prévost & White 2000a). Finally, the beginners produce finite verbs in nonfinite positions, which is not reported in child L2 French. It is argued that this is due to the lack of overt infinitival morphology in the L1, rather than to impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]