Chapter 4 discusses foundational studies linking theoretical findings in second language acquisition and classroom research. The first part of the chapter presents the linguistic background for adverb placement in English and in French within the Principles and Parameters framework of Universal Grammar and then focuses on intervention studies on the acquisition of verb movement and adverb placement in English as a second language by Francophone children in Montreal. The second part of the chapter focuses on question formation in English, the developmental sequences learners of English go through in the acquisition of questions in English, and Pienemann’s Processability Theory, which has been the impetus for important studies on the acquisition of question formation in English as a second language.

Research into comparative syntax over the last four decades has revealed that, despite some quite considerable superficial differences, syntactic variation among different languages and varieties is not random, but is ultimately constrained by a small and finite set of principles and parameters, the number and nature of which can be successfully teased apart especially through the careful study of closely related languages and varieties where, all other things being equal, a particular parametric choice can be readily isolated. It is for this reason that investigations of parametric variation in the area of syntax have so often drawn on Romance data since empirical investigations of Romance morphosyntax, especially of non-standard varieties and dialects in more recent times, have uncovered a wealth of small-scale microvariation. Drawing on such examples as the variation found in subject clitic systems, auxiliary selection (variously driven by transitivity, mood, tense, and grammatical person), active participle agreement, the extent and distribution of verb movement, sentential negation, and C(omplementizer)-systems (e.g., dual/triple complementizer systems; V2; availability of V-to-C movement and focus fronting), this chapter provides a critical overview of the some of the principal dimensions of morphosyntactic parametric variation with the aim of identifying the nature of the choices involved and, in particular, the differences between macro-, meso-, micro-, and nanoparameters and how these are formally organized within the grammar, the interaction between these parameters both in diachrony and synchrony, and what the formal limits of such parametric variation are.

This chapter reviews a number of issues concerning Scandinavian object shift and object scrambling of the type found in the Germanic OV-languages. It differs from earlier reviews in that it adopts as its null hypothesis that the two phenomena should be given a unified treatment. An important reason for this is that object shift and scrambling are subject to similar effect-on-output conditions. This raises the question why object shift and scrambling behave differently with respect to, e.g., Holmberg’s Generalization. It will be argued that this is due to the fact that object movement is subject to various language-specific, violable constraints.