Understanding Interfaces

Reviews / Votes

This book is a wonderful example of how combining data sets across different types of learning groups, in this case mainly adult second language learners and native-language attriters, demonstrates more combined than the data sets do in isolation. Dominguez's impressive and exhaustive analysis is based on formal linguistic theory. She does an exceptional job of covering the history of studies on subject realization and word order variation, mainly in Spanish, providing new data from carefully designed methodologies that together challenge seemingly accepted norms. She argues effectively that the sum total of available data, including her own, do not seem to lend unambiguous support to the Interface Hypothesis, showing, alternatively, that non-native acquisition and native-language attrition are complex phenomena that cannot be captured simply by postulating that the interface between syntax and its discourse interpretability is the sole or default domain of inherently difficulty. She offers a revised view of "interface" problems, which leads us away from syntactic complexity and focuses, rather, on the interpretive conditions for syntactic representation. This view seemingly can account for issues noted in the literature, e.g. where they are predicted to not obtain as is the clear case of narrow syntactic native attrition in adulthood. This is a must have book for anyone interested in adult acquisition and attrition, irrespective of the particular language focus of one's research. -- Jason Rothman, University of Reading