THE FORMAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL SELECTIVITY

OF L1 INFLUENCE ON L2 ACQUISITION

Helmut Zobl
UniversitC de Moncton, Canada

This study applies structuralist insights into the mechanisms of contact-

induced language change to an examination of the selectivity of L l influence on
L2 acquisition. The principle of selectivity refers to formal properties that make
L2 structures immune or receptive to L1 influence as well as L2 developmental
stages that activate L1 transfer along a time axis. Basic to the approach set forth is
the structuralist assumption that a language will accept only those external
influences that correspond to its own structural tendencies and systemic biases.
It is proposed that areas of an L2 potentially susceptible to L1 influence can be
identified through an examination of that L2’s learner-language. This entity refers
to developmental aspects of the acquisition of that L2 both as a first and as a
second language.
The paper examines in some detail the formal parameters that govern the
selectivity of L1 transfer. The proposed approach is capable of accounting in a
principled way for conflicting findings reported in L2 research on the occurrence
and non-occurrence of structural transfer.

STRUCTURALISM AND CONTACT-INDUCED

LANGUAGE CHANGE

A great deal of scholarship during the period of structuralist linguistics

was devoted to what might be referred to metaphorically as the “chemis-
try” of language contact. The interaction of linguistic codes in the minds
of bilingual speakers was a field of inquiry that appeared to offer a unique
perspective on the nature of language systems and the mechanisms of lan-
guage change.
Two major assumptions concerning contact-induced language change
emerged during this period. Both assumptions combined to form an ex-
planatory framework designed to account for the selective and differential
influence languages have on each other under conditions of contact. The
first assumption states that the various subsystems of a language display
differing degrees of coherence and stability, and that immunity to external
influence covaries with a subsystem’s degree of stability (Tesnikre 1939:
85). Stability was seen to reside in closed, determinate systems that evi-
dence a high degree of structural integration, e.g., inflectional morphology,
pronoun systems, and phonemic systems. Instability was attributed to

43
44 Language Learning Vol. 30,No. 1

open-ended systems with combinatorial freedom and to irregular para-

digms lacking internal consistency. This latter aspect of the stability principle
was termed the “Structural Hole Theory.” (Weinreich 1954:4142) It holds
that the internal structure of the language itself, i.e., its systemic biases, is
partly responsible for its selective resistance to and acceptance of foreign
influence.
The second, more inclusive assumption on contact-induced change states
that the “language differential” (Haugen 1969:380-381), that is, the degree
of structural congruity of two contact languages, acts to constrain the
amount and type of linguistic borrowing. This assumption derives from
Sapir’s notion (1949, Chapter IX) that the “psychological attitude” of the
borrowing language must be compatible with the external influence. Accord-
ing to Sapir, a language will only accept foreign influences that correspond to
the direction of its “drift.” Vogt (1954:372) explicates this view as follows:

. . . a given linguistic system is only capable of a limited number of immediate struc-

tural innovations at any one point in time; the system as it is conditions
those systems that can be derived from it. Linguistic interference affects the system
only insofar as the foreign elements correspond to some of these innovation possibili-
ties offered by the receiving system.

Actual research on bilingual communities was governed to a large ex-

tent by these two assumptions (e.g., Weinreich 1966, Haugen 1969, Ray-
field 1970, Seaman 1972). The analysis of linguistic borrowing in the form
of structural transfers and loan attempted to establish the relationship between
the incidence of borrowing and, more importantly, the type of borrowing on
the one hand and the structuralists’ assumptions on the other. The methodo-
logical approach often consisted of a comparison of two languages, a and b, in
contact with a third language, c, with a view to determining the differential
influence exercised by c on the structures and systems of a and b. Although
this approach was beset with methodological pitfalls because of the difficulty
of holding nonstructural factors constant (for examples see Weinreich 1966 :
3), it would seem that the two major assumptions possessed considerable
explanatory power. While limitations of space preclude a detailed survey,
a few findings illustrating the workings of the language differential will be
mentioned.
Germanic languages in contact with English readily adopted English
verbs and integrated them into their morphologies (Haugen 1956:32, Ray-
field 1970:6364). This stands in contrast to Greek, for example, which
adapted few Enghsh verbs, preferring instead to use the English infinitive
 Zobl 45

form in combination with a Greek auxiliary (Seaman 1972: 189). Seaman

(1972:186) suggests that the synthetic structure of Greek promoted a pre-
ference for outright code switching in place of morphemic adaptation. To
take a structurally more divergent case, Deroy (1956:70-71) explains that
the absence of verb borrowing from Arabic to Spanish during the centuries of
contact when Spain was under Moorish domination was a consequence of the
incompatibility of the Spanish and Semitic verb systems. Clyne (1972:22)
reports that a comparative investigation of immigrant Hungarian and immi-
grant German in Australia showed a greater prevalence of transfer errors
from English in German, the language with the larger degree of phonemic,
morphemic, and syntactic correspondence.
These few, but representative, cases permit us to see that structural diver-
gence promotes structural immunity and constrains the form the influence
can take. Another important finding from the structuralist period concerns
the absence of substantive borrowing and structural transfer at the level of
bound morphology. Tesnibe (1939:91-92), and before him Schuchardt
(1883), argued that conflicting morphologies will tend to cancel each other
out and lead to simplification. Weinreich’s observation (1966:4142) that in
language contact it is the language possessing free and invariant morphemes
that will act as the modelling influence complements the views of Tesnihre
and Schuchardt on morphological simplification.

CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS AND ITS CRITICS

The preceding introductory overview is relevant to the ongoing theo-

retical debate on the status of L1 transfer in second language acquisition.
While many of the structuralists’ insights into contact phenomena were
formulated with phonological systems in mind (e.g., the Structural Hole
Hypothesis), this paper, which is concerned with syntactic transfer, will
attempt to show the relevance of these insights for syntactic structures.
In retrospect, the lack of predictive power on the part of contrastive
analysis can be traced in part to its oversimplification of the findings of
structuralist research. For example, Politzer’s experiment (1968) on the
effect of presenting contrasting or parallel structures on subsequent learning
is one of the few studies that exploited the structuralist insight into the
inverse relationship between structural divergence and transfer. In the
majority of cases one clung to the view that radical structural divergence
would produce a maximum amount of interference. In the contrastive litera-
46 Language Learning Vol. 30, No. I

ture of the fifties and sixties one looks in vain for the all-important structural-
ist principle that the receiving language (i.e., the L2) must contain certain
systemic biases, or what Vogt calls innovation possibilities, in order for
transfer to make structural inroads.
The perception of structural transfer current in L2 research today derives
not only from contrastive analysis itself but also from its critics. Dulay and
Burt (1972, 1974a), in their presentations of the “creative construction
hypothesis” disqudify the contrastive analysis hypothesis on two theoretical
accounts and on the basis of a selected number of English structures for
which no evidence of transfer could be found in the speech of Spanish-
speaking ESL learners. I will have occasion later on to critically examine one
of the structures sampled.
Dulay and Burt’s first objection bears on the use made by CA of the
findings by Weinreich (1966) and Haugen (1956) on transfer in the lan-
guages of bilingual communities. They point out that these findings
pertain to bilingual speakers more or less proficient in two languages and
that in many instances the linguistic transfer is in the direction of the L2
to the L1, a direction L2 acquisition research is not concerned with. What
the authors fail to perceive, however, is that both Weinreich and Haugen
were conducting their research in the context of a long tradition of struc-
turalist research on contact-induced language change. This tradition sought
to elaborate general principles of contact-induced change for which the
direction of transfer was not crucial. For the explication of the structural
mechanisms involved in the workings of the stability and the language differ-
ential hypotheses the focus is on the relationship between donor and re-
ceiving languages, not on L1 and L2.
Dulay and Burt’s second objection to CA bases itself on the mistaken
assumption that linguistic transfer necessarily entails a view of language as
a set of habits. While CA undoubtedly contributed in large measure to the
propagation of t h s view, in hindsight it is difficult to see how the language
differential hypothesis, as spelled out in structuralist research, was considered
compatible with a habit-based view of language. If structurally more con-
gruent languages lead to a greater incidence of linguistic transfer than struc-
turally divergent languages, are we to assume that speakers of the former
internalized these languages as sets of habits while speakers of the latter
elected to use cognitive mechanisms instead? The way that the language
differential is invoked as an explanatory framework by structuralists shows
only too clearly that they were working on their own version of mentalistic
linguistics. Ultimately their work was concerned with the question of how
 Zobl 47

language systems are organized and stored in the minds of bilingual speakers
given that structurally different languages and different subsystems of a
language display quantitative and qualitative differences in their susceptibility
to transfer phenomena.

TRANSFER IN L2 ACQUISITION

Over the past few years evidence has accumulated which suggests that a
monolingual L2 acquisition environment with rich verbal input favours a
course of acquisition that is free of overt structural transfer (Ervin-Tripp
1974:121). Nonetheless, there are studies on record of informal L2 acquisi-
tion by chddren where in spite of comparable learning environments the
course of acquisition was marked by developmental forms and stages which
the authors attributed to the L1 (e.g., Malmberg 1945, Ruke-Dravina 1967,
Ravem 1968, Cancino, Rosansky, and Schumann 1975, Wode 1976, Molony
1977). Moreover, a comparison of L2 acquisition under formal conditions
involving French and English (Selinker, Swain, and Dumas 1975, Harley and
Swain 1978, Zobl 1979a) with Ervin-Tripp’s study (1974) suggests that the
language differential goes further in accounting for certain types of transfer
than the nature of the acquisition environment.
The following sections attempt to exploit structuralist assumptions on
contact-induced language change for an analysis of the selectivity of L1
influence on L2 acquisition. Basic to the approach set forth is the view
that the receiving language (i.e., the L2) must contain certain systemic
biases and structural tendencies in order to render it susceptible to influ-
ence from a near-congruent L1. I propose that we begin to identify these
susceptible structures of an L2 by considering the language of learners ac-
quiring that L2 either natively or as a second language. The learner-language
of the L2 wilI include developmental sequences in the acquisition of syntactic
structures, mistaken analyses, overgeneralizations and other kinds of develop-
mental errors. The proposed approach thus attributes formal properties of
natural languages bearing on their resistance and susceptibility to externally
induced change to the construct “learner-language.” This research heuristic
follows from the fundamental fact that Ll influence impinges not on a
synchronic grammar of L2 adult competence, but rather on those formal and
dynamic properties that characterize learner-language in general and, on a
particular level, the learner-languages of individuals’ L2’s. In contrast to
Adjemian (1976), who considers permeability a property of interlanguage
48 Language Learning Vol. 30, No. 1

making transfer possible, it is proposed here that permeability and stability

should not be ascribed in toto but rather as properties of L2 structures or
systems by virtue of their behaviour in acquisition.
Zobl’s study (1979b) of a German-speaking child’s acquisition of English
also points to the importance of the L2’s hstorical evolution as a source of
insight into its structural loopholes. The study found striking parallels be-
tween the structural constraints operative in the subject’s shift from post
main-verb negation to negation with periphastic do and the spread of peri-
phrastic do in the evolution of English. In both cases main clause structures
without direct objects were the last environments to give up the post main-
verb negation rule.

THE SELECTIVITY OF TRANSFER

ALONG THE DEVELOPMENTAL AXIS

Zobl’s study (1979a) of the English interrogative constructions of French-

speaking adult ESL learners found that structural transfer from French was
limited to the restriction in French interrogative syntax on copular and
auxiliary verb inversion with noun subjects. This restriction manifested itself
in a greater frequency of declarative word order with noun subjects and in the
use of “detour” constructions with noun subjects, the chief one being the
employment of a preposed dummy auxdiary, e.g., Is his name is Richard?
Interrogative constructions employing a dummy auxiliary are amply
documented in Enghsh L1 (e.g., Klima and Bellugi 1966) and English L2
(e.g., Wode 1978). French-speaking ESL learners differ in two chief
respects in their use of this construction. First, its use is overwhelmingly
confined to noun subjects whereas in other studies it occurs freely with
pronoun subjects as well. Second, they evolve this construction at a level
of development when auxiliary verb-pronoun subject inversion is becoming
established in their interrogative syntax. In other studies where t h s con-
struction is attested it does not evolve concurrently with pronoun subject
inversion. This developmental timetable with respect to the emergence of
the preposed dummy auxiliary construction coupled with the finding that
beginners do not make use of it in spontaneous speech but rely instead on
declarative word order, argues strongly for the following interpretation. The
establishment of pronoun subject-auxiliary verb inversion and the perception
of the syntactic nearcongruity of English and French pronoun subject inter-
rogation activates the transfer of the restriction on noun subject inversion. At
 Zobl 49

this point of development French-speaking ESL learners have sufficient

knowledge of the functioning of the auxiliary system to permit them to
approximate the target structure via the dummy auxiliary construction.
This developmental aspect of transfer-that learners must attain a certain
level of development with respect to an L2 structure before transfer is acti-
vated-has been noted by Wode (1977) in connection with the shift from
preverb no to postverb not in the English L2 development of German-speak-
ing children. Wode demonstrates convincingly that the syntactic congruity of
English and German in negative positioning with modal verbs activates the
transfer of the L1 rule.
In both cases, then, we find that transfer is selective along the develop-
mental axis. Both French-speaking and German-speaking learners of English
must attain a level of structural development with respect to the syntactic
behaviour of a subcategory which evidences a high degree of congruity in L2
and L1. With French speakers it is the behaviour of pronoun subjects in
auxiliary verb inversion; with German speakers it is the behaviour of modal
verbs in negative positioning. This triggers transfer with respect to a non-
congruent subcategory. French learners employ a dummy auxiliary with noun
subjects, and German learners extend modal verb negation to main verbs.

THE SELECTIVITY OF TRANSFER

ALONG THE FORMAL AXIS

Verb types

Zobl’s study (1979b) of a German-speaking child’s acquisition of English

examined the use of L1 rules in yes/no questions and negation with different
verb types. Results of the study showed that although at an early stage the
positioning of the negative marker did not show co-occurrence restrictions
with verb types, subsequently verbs inflected for progressive aspect (V-ing)
were excluded from the transferred L1 rules which led to subject-base verb
inversion in yeslno questions and postverb positioning of the negative marker
with base verbs. This systematic exclusion of V-ing from the transferred L1
rules-the verb type did occur in declarative affirmative syntax-provides
strong evidence that structural transfer is subject not only to a scale of syn-
tactic congruity but also to a scale of morphological similarity. Since modal
verbs are the pivotal verb type in activating transfer from the L1, the exclusion
of V-ing must relate to its morphological distinctness. Let us consider some
50 Language Learning Vol. 30, No. I

further evidence concerning the behaviour of V-ing in English L2.

For French L1 and English L2 the possibilities provided by French for
pronoun subject-main verb inversion never transfer to V-ing structures.
One finds isolated, and unproductive, occurrences of What have you and
What want you. However, one never finds theoretically possible transfer
structures such as Coming he (Vient-il), Marie singing she (Marie chante-t-
elle) and Where going you (Ou vas-tu) (Zobl 1979a). In the examples pro-
vided by Wode (1976) of the transfer of postverb negation from German
there are no instances of this rule applying to V-ing. Similarly, Ravem’s data
(1968, 1975) on his son’s occasional use of post main-verb negation and his
more productive use of main verb inversion in yes/no interrogatives show that
V-ing was immune to transfer from Norwegian.
Another perspective on the selectivity of L1 transfer with regard to
verb types in English can be gained by considering errors of verb subcate-
gorization by learners whose background rules out transfer. Huang (1971)
studied the acquisition of English by a Chinese-speaking child over a five-
month period. Paul, the subject, acquired English without any apparent
influence from his L1. At Time IX, which was the third to last period in
Huang’s longitudinal study, Paul suddenly produced two recorded (pos-
sibly there were more?) tokens of postverb negation with want (Huang 1971):

1. I want not go home

2. I want not this

This is surprising in light of the fact that up until Time IX Paul had used
preverb dont with want constructions. At Time IX, however, Paul also
starts to use modal verbs more productively, eg., in interrogation. It would
appear that Paul was testing a hypothesis to the effect that want is a modal
verb.
Miller and Ervin-Tripp (1973 :372-373) report that a child acquiring
English as his L1 produced at age 2 :3 :

Want d’you policeman?

They explicitly link this interrogative construction to the child’s having

perceived want as a modal verb. Thus it would seem that there are systemic
biases in English which provoke a classification of want as a modal verb.
In Zobl (1979b) it was pointed out that want was one of the last main
verbs to give up the German inversion rule in interrogation and the negative
 Zobl 51

placement rule. The similarity between want and modals in surface structure
patterning leads to this analysis: Both want and modals are categorized as
“preverbs” that are followed by a main verb. Thus we can see that the same
formal properties that lead an Enghh L1 and a Chinese-speaking English L2
learner to mistakenly classify want as a modal verb also account for the more
conservative behaviour of want in the English language development of the
German-speaking child. Want is unstable intrasystemically, and this property
makes it more susceptible to transfer from a language like German which does
not differentiate among verb types in negation and interrogation. Given that
Huang’s, Miller and Ervin-Tripp’s, and Zobl’s subjects extend modal-specific
rules to want;and given that Norwegian L1 and German L1 learners further
extend these rules to base verbs-prompted to this by their L1 -we can set up
a scale for verb type similarity:
BASE VERB > WANT > MODALS
V-ing verbs fall outside this similarity scale.
This formal difference between modals and base verbs on the one hand,
and V-ing on the other shows up as well in a diachronic consideration of
English. Until about 1500, modals and main verbs formed a common class.
Both were subject to similar rules in interrogation and negation, and both
were capable of taking direct objects (Lightfoot 1974:240-241). What we
know as the progressive continuous verb form has completely different
historical origins, beginning as a substantive and only gradually taking on
more verb-like properties (Jesperson 1962:182ff.). Surprisingly, in a study of
English L2 acquisition by four children of different L1 backgrounds, Frith
(1977:46) does in fact raise the question of whether traces of the former
substantive function of V-ing may not still be at work in one of her subject’s
analysis of the progressive construction.

Wh-questions

Ravem’s study (1968) of his son’s language acquisition drew attention

to a striking difference in his son’s interrogative development. Yes/no ques-
tions appeared to be subject to transfer from Norwegian. Typical examples of
subject-base verb inversion cited by Ravem were Climb you? and Like you
food? The absence of this inversion and the use of declarative word order in
wh-questions was considered by Ravem (1975:173) a finding that argued for
the similarity of L1 and L2 acquisition. Like the Harvard children (Klima and
Bellugi 1966), his son at Time I11 inverted in yes/no questions but used
declarative word order in information questions. Zobl (1979b) found a
52 Language Learning Vol. 30, No. 1

dynamic parallel to this distributional difference. In his subject’s speech,

subject-base verb inversion was abandoned in wh-questions about 2 to 3
months before it was abandoned in yeslno questions. In both cases, then,
whquestions displayed greater immunity to transfer from the L1 than yes/no
questions.
Once again, let us consider the behaviour of these question types on a
wider basis. As mentioned above, Klima and Bellugi’s study (1966) was the
first to draw attention to the innovative role of yes/no questions in acquir-
ing auxiliary verb inversion. While Ravem’s and Zobl’s subjects conform to
this developmental trend, Wode (1978) and Cancino, Rosansky, and
Schumann (1975) report that inversion was applied more or less at the
same time in both question types. Nonetheless, on balance it would cer-
tainly seem that yes/no questions are progressive; no one has yet produced
evidence that whquestions are clearly the first to acquire inversion. While
I do not propose to hazard an explanation of this difference, we are still
left with the startling fact that the question type that is developmentally
more stable, i.e., slower to evidence inversion in English learner-language,
is also the one that is more immune to transfer; the question type that is
structurally innovative for inversion in English learner-language is also the
one that is susceptible to L1 transfer.

Pronominal syntax

I observed earlier that French-speaking ESL students do not transfer

the possibilities provided by French for subject pronoun-main verb inversion
except in isolated instances. French-speaking learners of English also never
produce constructions such as I them see in analogy to the French Je les vois.
Spanish-speaking children learning English similarly do not reproduce the
object pronoun-verb sequence of their L1 (Dulay and Burt 1974b:134).
However, for English-speaking children learning French there is evidence that
they reproduce English word order. Ervin-Tripp (1974:119) cites this
example :

Je vois elle

Selinker, Swain, and Dumas (1975:145) report tokens such as these:

Le chien a mange les

I1 veut les encore
 Zobl 53

and Harley and Swain (1978) report constructions with post-verb object
pronoun in the speech of English children who were in their sixth (!) year
of French immersion. Note that the type of acquisition environment is
clearly of less relevance than the language differential. The French-speak-
ing adult ESL learners, who do not reproduce French word order, do not
have the informal input of Ervin-Tripp’s children, nor do they have the
richer verbal environment of the immersion pupils in the studies by Selinker,
Swain, and Dumas, and Harley and Swain.
What must strike a reader of the Dulay and Burt (1974b) and the Ervin-
Tripp (1974) studies as somewhat strange is the common interpretation given
to conflicting evidence. Dulay and Burt take the nonoccurrence of object
pronoun-verb sequences in the English speech of Spanish-speaking children
as evidence pointing to the irrelevance of transfer to child L2 acquisition, and
as evidence for construction processes common to L1 and L2 acquisition.
Ervin-Tripp takes Je vois elk, seemingly modelled on the English, as evidence
pointing in the same direction, namely the similarity of L1 and L2 acquisi-
tion. Since English-speaking children show a preference for a perceptual SVO
strategy in L1 acquisition, Je vois elle is declared to be a product of an L1
acquisition strategy. Can one really have it both ways?
Consider first the absence of the transfer of the object pronoun posi-
tion from French L1 or Spanish L1 to English L2. All three languages have
VO word order in nominal syntax. Furthermore, English input nowhere
would lead a French-speaking or a Spanish-speaking ESL learner to hypo-
thesize that English has some congruity with his or her L1 with respect to
object pronoun placement: English is consistently VO. Finally, the object
pronoun in both Spanish and French is a preverb clitic that has the status
of a bound morpheme; that is, unlike the free forms we find in English,
e.g., me, him, them, the French and Spanish forms cannot occur in isola-
tion. Recall in this connection the structuralist observation that patterns
involving bound morphology will not influence a contact language, espe-
cially when that language uses free forms for equivalent functions. The
combination of these three structural parameters rules out structural transfer.
For English speakers learning French the case is different. First, French
input with nominal syntax will be confirmation to the learner of the exist-
ence of SVO word order. Second, the pronominal OV order of French is
inherently more complex than the VO order of English. This is brought out in
a study by Lightbown (1977:212ff.) who compared aspects of the native
acquisition of French to the acquisition of French by English-speaking
children. She observes that in both types of acquisition learners over-
54 Language Learning Vol. 30, No. I

whelmingly employ nominal syntax-whch has SVO-and almost never use

the clitic pronoun. Hence, French learner-language itself shows a strong
systemic bias towards SVO word order. In this connection it is worth noting
that, since nouns obligatorily and quantifiers like tous/tout optionally have
VO syntax, the pronouns would have to be generated to the right of the verb
in the phrase structure rules of French (cf. Adjemian 1976:307). Under these
structural conditions the transfer of English word order to French is possible.
Turning to the subject pronoun, why does French L1, unlike German
L1 and Norwegian L1, never lead to English L2 constructions such as Walks
he? (Marche-t-il?) English, German, and Norwegian share the subject-verb
transposition rule, regardless of whether the subject is a noun or a pronoun.
French and English share the rule only with pronoun subjects. Furthermore,
the main verb-pronoun subject inversion rule is largely limited to present
tense contexts in spoken French (Terry 1970: 35, 46). There is strong inde-
pendent evidence from Early Modern English (Zobl 1978) that the restriction
in the scope of a rule to present tense contexts is a reliable indicator that the
rule is becoming unproductive. Thus in Early Modern English remnants of the
older system which inverted the main verb in interrogation are found pre-
dominantly in present tense contexts. Also, with the pronoun subject-main
verb inversion rule of French we are dealing once again with a movement rule
applying only to clitic pronouns. It will be a matter of future research to
attempt to formalize in terms of types of rules the structuralists’ insights into
the transfer potential, or the lack of it, of linguistic structures and systems
(Zobl, forthcoming).

CONCLUSION

This paper has attempted to demonstrate that structural transfer from the
L1 is selective along a developmental and a formal axis. The formal axis was
defined in terms of systems and structures of the L2 that differ along such
dimensions as stability (verb types), consistency (word order), and innovative-
ness (question types) in that L2’s learner-language. One important conclusion
to be drawn from the analyses of transfer selectivity is that formal properties
of the L2 that control general developmental aspects of its acquisition figure
as well in the selective workings of transfer. This points the way to a develop-
mental process model of L2 acquisition in which formal features of the L2
control the relevant aspects of its acquisition, including the activation of L1
transfer.
 Zobl 55

The formal and developmental axes account in a principled way for the
absence of transfer in certain English L2 structures one finds cited in the
literature. For example, the fact that Japanese learners of English do not
transfer the position of the negative marker in Japanese is frequently adduced
in support of the view that transfer plays no role in informal child L2 acquisi-
tion (Gillis and Weber 1976:86, McLaughlin 1978:106-107). I would propose
that this is a consequence of the typological divergence exhibited by English
and Japanese, and the morphological status of the Japanese negative marker
which is a particle suffixed to the verb.
The selectivity of transfer along the developmental axis accounts for
the absence of such theoretically possible but completely unrealistic trans-
fers as bigs houses and tulls boys (cf. Dulay and Burt 1972:247). Agree-
ment morphemes as a rule are acquired so late that by the time a Spanish-
speaking ESL learner has attained a level of L2 development where he or
she could theoretically transfer the L1 agreement rule, this same level of
development would automatically preclude such L1-based constructions.

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