Attainment and acquirability in second language acquisition

Lardiere Georgetown University, Washington When the editors of Second Language Research first inquired about the possibility of my guest-editing the special thematic issue of this volume, the topic they had in mind was ‘fossilization’. This theme, however, with its underlying focus on ultimate failure in second language acquisition (SLA), eventually came to feel too limiting. It is undeniable that many (if not most) adult second language (L2) acquirers ‘fail ’ if ‘success ’ is loosely defined as acquiring native-like competence and performance in the target language in all respects. Nor is it the case that such ‘failures’ are uninteresting: arriving at an adequate explanation for the differences we observe between native and non-native language acquisition has long been a goal of SLA research and can also be expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of human cognition in general. However, the research construct that can better exploit such a com-parison between different kinds of end-states is ‘ultimate attainment’. Not only is the term itself more neutral in its avoidance of notions of dubious theoretical value such as ‘success ’ and ‘failure’, but it is also more accurate. The study of ultimate attainment is potentially more illu-minating in regard to a central goal of modern linguistic inquiry (fol-lowing Chomsky, 1986): determining what properties must be attributable to the human mind/brain that could account for the nature of the complex system of knowledge that has actually been attained. In other words, we can only hope to understand the nature of the system by first examining what has actually been acquired (or not), given a par-ticular linguistic environment and – for SLA – prior knowledge of another I-language, and then ‘working backwards ’ to figure out how such a system could have possibly been acquired