In this article, we discuss the implications of the fact that adult second language learners (outside the classroom) universally develop a wellstructured, efficient and simple form of language -the Basic Variety (BV). Three questions are asked as to (1) the structural properties of the BV, (2) the status of these properties and (3) why some structural properties of 'fully fledged' languages are more complex. First, we characterize the BV in four respects: its lexical repertoire, the principles according to which utterances are structured, and temporality and spatiality expressed. The organizational principles proposed are small in number, and interact. We analyse this interaction, describing how the BV is put to use in various complex verbal tasks, in order to establish both what its communicative potentialities are, and also those discourse contexts where the constraints come into conflict and where the variety breaks down. This latter phenomenon provides a partial answer to the third question, concerning the relative complexity of 'fully fledged' languages -they have devices to deal with such cases. As for the second question, it is argued firstly that the empirically established continuity of the adult acquisition process precludes any assignment of the BV to a mode of linguistic expression (e.g.. 'protolanguage') distinct from that of 'fully fledged' languages and. moreover, that the organizational constraints of the BV belong to the core attributes of the human language capacity, whereas a number of complexifications not attested in the BV are less central properties of this capacity. Finally, it is shown that the notion of feature strength, as used in recent versions of Generative Grammar, allows a straightforward characterization of the BV as a special case of an I-language. in the sense of this theory. Under this perspective, the acquisition of an 1-language beyond the BV can essentially be described as a change in feature strength.

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In this paper we follow two beginning learners of English, Andrea and Santo, over a period of 2 years as they develop means to structure the declarative utterances they produce in various production tasks, and then we look at the following problem: In the early stages of acquisition, both learners develop a common learner variety; during these stages, we see a picture of two learner varieties developing similar regularities determined by the minimal requirements of the tasks we examine. Andrea subsequently develops further morphosyntactic means to achieve greater cohesion in his discourse. But Santo does not. Although we can identify contexts where the grammaticalization of Andrea's production allows him to go beyond the initial constraints of his variety, it is much more difficult to ascertain why Santo, faced with the same constraints in the same contexts, does not follow this path. Some lines of investigation into this problem are then suggested.We take the view that there are a limited number of pragmatic, semantic, and phrasal (morphosyntactic) organizational principles at work in learner languages, and that their interaction determines the actual organization of a given learner variety. The kind of interaction, and hence the specific contribution of each principle, may vary as a function of source language influence and of the proficiency level of the learner. Thus, the process of acquisition 1 can be viewed as the change in the interaction of these principles over time, and grammaticalization as one direction this change may (but need not) take, where the learner comes to give relatively more weight to phrasal principles.In this paper we follow two beginners (Andrea and Santo, who share Italian as a source language and who acquired English in England) over a period of 2 years as they develop means to structure the declarative utterances they produce in narratives of personal experiences, interviews, and descriptions of future plans and in a

This paper describes an approach to the study of adult language acquisition which takes the learner's attempts to express himself in context as an important factor determining the path of the acquisition process. The interaction of this factor with one other important determining factorthe relative typological proximity between source and target languageis discussed.Taking as an illustration some results from a larger study on clause structure in narrative discourse (see note 2) it is argued that once the learner attains a basic, workable learner variety for this type of discourse, further development will be motivated by the fact that initial constraints on the variety come into 'competition' in specifiable contexts. Contexts are examined where the semantic role of an act an t to its verb is at variance with the discourse status of the actant, and where the inherent temporal properties of a state of affairs described in an utterance are at variance with the intended temporal relationship of that utterance to others in the narrative. Such 'competition' can provoke the learner to further acquisition, which is more or less facilitated by the relative proximity of source-and target-language means to overcome the competition.In conclusion, it is argued that, if the type of approach described here is valid for the study of other aspects of learner performance, then contrastive predictions based on source-and target-language systems must fail to capture two important aspects of acquisitional change: its locus and its motivation.