Book reviews: Archibald, J. 1993: Language learnability and L2 phonology: the acquisition of metrical parameters. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 199 pp
as seriously impeding intelligibility in L2 production, but not surprisingly on the other hand, given a history of theoretical change and uncertainty in the description of lexical stress, especially with regard to English. What the few previous studies have shown is that patterns of learners’ L2 word stress do not reflect those of the L1 in any simple way and that certain classes of words in the L2 are clearly subject to independent interlanguage/universal influences in this respect (for L1 German/L2 English, see e.g., Grosser and Wieden, 1989). The present study confirms these previous observations, but offers an explanation of the phenomena in terms of an overall theory of metrical structure and language learnability. As such, Archibald introduces a new and welcome theoretical dimen-