Multiple grammars: Old wine in old bottles
Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) argue that all speakers – regardless of whether monolingual or bilingual – have multiple grammars in their mental language representations. They further claim that this simple assumption can explain many things: optionality in second language (L2) language behaviour, multilingualism, language change, and L2 language processing: in essence, all the developmental phenomena that are the focus of current research. A&R are right that a linguistic theory of multiple grammatical representations is necessary; however, their proposal falls short of explaining anything that we did not already know and in fact fails to account for what we do know. In my brief commentary I will address three points. First, the idea that multiple grammars has been at the foundations of models of L2 acquisition ever since the concept of ‘interlanguage’ was proposed. Second, I will clarify misunderstandings regarding recent work on L2 optionality. Third, A&R do not offer a new descriptive account of L2 optionality, let alone a new formal model of optionality, largely because they limit themselves to restating the problem instead of suggesting solutions. A&R argue that any human grammar has optionality, i.e. accommodates apparently incompatible rules or sub-grammars. This, A&R claim, is ignored by models of L2 acquisition. Some of these models, for example Full Transfer-Full Access (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996) argue that the point of departure in L2 acquisition is the final state of the L1 grammar and that acquiring a second language consists of progressively ‘restructuring’ the L1 grammar in the direction of the L2. A&R argue instead that ‘interlanguage is not being restructured away from the L1, but simply built on top of it.’ Do they mean by this that the L1 rules are not themselves changed and that they continue to co-exist alongside the developing L2 rules? It is clear that the L1 is not ‘replaced’ by the L2: recent work on L1 individual attrition indicates that mental representations of the L1 grammar are not themselves affected by exposure to L2 (Sorace, 2011), although access and allocation of processing resources affect the use of particular L1 structures. A&R suggest