Spatial Feature Assembly in First and Second Language Acquisition

In recent minimalist approaches to acquisition, there has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of the lexicon in accounts of syntactic variation. This paper extends the view of lexical feature assembly and reassembly articulated by Lardiere into the open-class lexicon and into the realm of motion events. An original L1 experiment reveals that variation in the syntax of motion events within French at all stages of development is of the same ilk as variation across languages, and is illuminated by a feature-based analysis. Implications are drawn out for L2 acquisition, in terms of lexical transfer and feature reassembly.