Discussion Article: Multiple Causes for the Variabilities in L2 Use of 3rd Person Singular -s in the Light of Distributed Morphology

Abstract

This discussion article tries to explain the variability commonly observed in second language learners' use of grammatical morphemes. For almost two decades, second language studies have tried to specify THE right answer for why (even very advanced) L2 learners exhibit persistent difficulty in using inflectional morphemes, typically substituting bare forms for inflected forms. This line of inquiry is in fact misguided, as argued in previous work (e.g., Wakabayashi, 2013). We advance the present study in a more principled ‘analytic’ way, building on the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993), and it will be made clear that variability in second language use arises at multiple levels, due to incompleteness at Numeration within the Lexicon, at operations within morphosyntax, at Vocabulary Insertion, and at mechanisms of performance that function after linguistic operations have concluded.