Language acquisition and the functional category system

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Research on spontaneous language acquisition in both children learning their mother tongue and adults acquiring a second language reveals that language development occurs in stages. These stages are represented by 'learner languages,' which are initially simple language systems. This monograph explores the development of learner languages in both child L1 and adult L2 Dutch. At the onset, the learner systems in both cases are primarily lexical, meaning that utterance structure is based on the lexical projection of a predicate-argument structure, lacking the functional properties of the target language. Over time, this lexical-semantic system evolves into a target-like system, where learners acquire the morpho-syntactic features necessary to express functional properties such as finiteness and topicality. Evidence of this progression includes word order variation and the use of linguistic elements like auxiliaries, tense, agreement markers, and determiners. The author examines this language acquisition process from a functional perspective, posing questions about the motivations behind learners transitioning from a simple lexical-semantic system to a more complex functional-pragmatic one, as well as the significance of linguistic features like inflection, word order variation, and definiteness.