Different? Yes. Fundamentally? No. Definiteness Effects in the L2 English of Mandarin Speakers

According to the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (FDH) of Bley-Vroman (1989, 1990), interlanguage grammars of adult learners differ from the grammars of native speakers in a number of fundamental respects. In particular, adults are claimed to lack domain-specific learning mechanisms, including Universal Grammar (UG). This is not meant to imply that learners necessarily fail to acquire subtle and abstract properties of the L2: where such knowledge is achieved despite a poverty of the L2 stimulus, the assumption is that it comes from the L1. However, over the years it has been shown that L2ers are highly sensitive to subtle syntactic and semantic properties which are underdetermined by the L2 input and which could not have come from the L1 (see White 2003b for overview). For example, studies have demonstrated that L2 learners have unconscious knowledge of principles of UG, including Subjacency (e.g. White & Juffs 1998), Binding Principles (e.g. Thomas 1991), the Overt Pronoun Constraint (e.g. Kanno 1997), as well as interpretive principles relevant to the syntax/semantics interface (e.g Dekydtspotter, Sprouse & Anderson 1997; Dekydtspotter, Sprouse & Thyre 2001). Consequently, it is not at all clear that there is a fundamental difference in the domain of abstract syntax or at the syntax/semantics interface. At the same time, it is clear that L2ers often exhibit problems in certain grammatical domains, including inflectional morphology and function words. L2ers often fail to produce morphology – or produce inappropriate forms – and this can be a long-lasting problem, resulting in fossilization (Lardiere 1998; White 2003a). In other words, there are clear differences between native speakers and L2ers in the morphological domain, which may or may not be fundamental. In this paper, I investigate article production in Mandarin-speaking learners of English. I will suggest that there are indeed differences between the behaviour of adult L2ers and native speakers but that these differences do not indicate a fundamental difference in the unconscious knowledge attained. Despite non-native article production, L2ers are sensitive to subtle semantic restrictions on article production, in particular to certain restrictions on the incidence of definite articles (Milsark 1977).