A Unificational Mechanism for Morphological Developmental Sequence

Abstract

The present study examines the question on what mechanism operates on the development of L2 morphology, and how Pienemann's Morpheme Processability Hierarchy (Pienemann, 1998, Pienemann & Hakansson, 1999) can be extended For the questions, this study proposes a unificational (morphological) mechanism (UM) by extrapolating the Uniqueness Condition (UC) to the syntactic developmental sequence on X-bar formats in the Minimalist program (Chomsky, 1992). Consequently, the UM not only governs the unification processes of grammatical features or morphemes in real time, but also determines the implicational syntactic domains or scopes on which the UC operates, or in which feature unification takes place. According to the UM, this study proposes a revised Morphological Developmental Sequence (MDS) extended from Pienemann's Morpheme Processability Hierarchy based on the UC. Thus, the MDS can explain the interactional processes of morphological development with syntactic development more systematically by incorporating cognitive mechanisms and linguistic mechanisms according to the Modular Approach (Ellis, 1994; Gregg, 1996; Pienemann, 1998).