THE ADULT L2 ACQUISITION OF THE SAXON GENITIVE: ITALIAN AND SPANISH RESULTS

The main goal of this paper is to give evidence for the general hypothesis that adult subjects learning a second language have access to Universal Grammar (UG) at all stages. According to our new findings, L1 transfer is not only what is at hand in the acquisition of the Saxon Genitive by Spanish speaking adults, since Spanish grammar bans the presence of determiners in prenominal possessors (e.g. *ellun mi amigo), and yet Spanish adults produce the scone type of errors found with Italian adults, according to results reported by Bennati and Domenico (2007), whose L1 allows the possibility of having a prenominal possessor following the determiner (illun mio amico).