As the basis for L2 profiling, PT has the explanatory merits for the development of lexical entries with grammatical features, phrase structures and morphology in SLA. It could therefore benefit either the language learners or the linguists and teachers in comprehension of the underlying route for the language acquisition. Pienemann (1998c and 2005) has proposed the processing constraints to explain why certain
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structures are learned earlier or later. Granted, not everyone holds this view.
Some scholars have claimed that L1 grammar can ‘bulk-transfer’ to L2 and that learners reset the parameters with different values in their L1s (Eubank, 1993; Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994 and 1996). It is termed Full Transfer, Full Access (FT/FA). FT/FA hypothesizes that the initial state of L2 acquisition is the final state of L1 acquisition (Full Transfer) and that failure to assign a representation to input data will force subsequent restructurings, drawing from options of Universal Grammar (UG) (Full Access) (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996). To be specific, Eubank (1993) has insisted that both lexical and functional categories can be transferred from L1 o L2; while Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994 and 1996a) believed that transfer is only limited to lexical categories but not functional categories.
However, Pienemann (1998c) has claimed that the above assumption is empirically implausible on the basis of the Developmental Moderated Transfer Hypothesis. The initial state of the L2 does not necessarily equal the final state of the L1, because there is no guarantee that ‘the given L1 structure is processable by the under-developed L2 parser’ (Håkansson, Pienemann and Sayehli, 2002: 250-251). Instead, L1 transfer is constrained by the processability of the given structures.
Håkansson, Pienemann and Sayehli (2002) have looked into the transfer of ‘verb-second’ in Swedish learners of German, which exists in both Swedish and German. Based on FT/FA, these German L2 learners should be able to acquire this ‘verb-second’ structure at the initial stage. However, the results have shown that this structure is not transferred unless the learners have acquired the stage 1 and stage 2 of the processing hierarchy.
It has also been argued that though PT comprises a number of principles of great generality, accounting, in principle, for the acquisition of any structures in a language, the use of the term ‘process’ and the nature of supporting evidence are problematic in PT (Bialystok, 1998; Dyson, 2004; Hulstijn, 1998). The issues of mental representations are not referred to in a clear manner. How does processing work in the brain? Is the learner’s individual brain capacity considered in PT?
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In fact, Pienemann (1998a) pointed out that PT does not take the initial state or general learning mechanisms as its point of departure; instead, it argues in terms of processing constraints. Given this feature, PT does not predict that whatever can be processed will be definitely acquired. Indeed, the theory predicts that what cannot be processed will never be acquired. Regarding the processing procedure working in the brain, Pienemann (1998c and 2005) has illustrated its process with Levelt’s (1989) Speaking Model. The individual learner’s brain capacity has not been taken as a core issue within the processing hierarchy but it should be considered for the future extension of PT.
Furthermore, Hulstijn (1998) has considered that all processing prerequisites in PT except one (perceptual salience) are all formal in nature. Being the only non-formal principle, perceptual salience is to account for the emergence of adverbials at the sentence initial positions. However, a full explanation of SLA should be based on both formal (morphosyntactic) and informational principles, which are to be integrated in a developmental pattern. According to Hulstijn (1998), PT has not entirely succeeded yet in explaining how language learners cope with informational and linguistic demands at various stages of language development.
In fact, the role of non-formal principles, such as allowing semantic-informational and formal principles to compete with each other in different ways at different stages of development, has been investigated and extended in the research collection of Pienemann (2005), from which this issue has been discussed within the Lexical Mapping Theory. In the extended architecture of PT, an additional set of semantic principles has contributed to the formal modeling of levels of processability, namely the mapping of a-structure onto f-structure in Lexical Mapping Theory (Pienemann, 2005).
Another question that has been deliberately addressed: how does application shape development. White (1991) has argued that the performance could not account for competence since it is believed that the performance could be ‘cheating’ in some cases. Obviously, the foundation of PT is built upon the examination of the learners’ use of
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languages, which seems to violate White’s opinion.
As a matter of fact, the learners’ performance has been sketched as a ‘real-time use of the grammar in the comprehension and production of utterance’ (Hawkins, 2003: 23). From Pienemann’s (1998c and 2005) viewpoints, L2 learners progressively annotate the L2 lexicon with grammatical information and build up procedures that can hold this information. The processing architecture develops competence since innate knowledge per se cannot explain features of L2 development. Moreover, Pienemann collected the performance data through the longitudinal as well as cross-sectional studies, which could largely avoid ‘cheating’ over the time scale.
As for the emergence criterion used in PT, some arguments have occurred and caused intense debates. In the emergence criterion, the emergence frequency of a grammatical structure is not fixed. From the previous research related to PT, some scholars take the emergence criterion as being three times, whereas others take it as four or five times. In this case, it is hard to decide which one is more reliable. If a person has successfully presented one structure in one data clip three times, some researchers may class it as having been acquired, yet others may not, based on the different criteria. In this case, some scholars are in favor of the analytical approach that combines emergence and accuracy (Bardovi-Harlig, 1994 and 2000; Norris and Ortega cited in Doughty and Long, 2005). This combination is more informative than an exclusive focus on emergence or accuracy, which would benefit teachers in assessing the learners’ acquisition level.
However, in the PT-based studies, the combination of the emergence criterion with the accuracy criterion could somehow enable the research to be sophisticated and may also result in other unexpected issues, for example, how to link these two criteria at one time. During an informal talk with Professor Pienemann, he has suggested that the point of implementing PT into SLA was mainly to help the learners’ acquisition of particular language structures. Even though the learners may be under-evaluated due to the setting of different emergence criteria, they would still benefit when the instructor(s) could reinforce certain grammatical items in lessons.
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Another case to challenge PT is carried out by Dewaele and Véronique (2001). They have applied PT to test the agreement in French adjectives with the focus on the accuracy levels in gender assignment, among the French interlanguage of 27 Dutch L1 speakers. Their findings have proved that the accuracy rate for gender agreement in French cannot be reduced due to the variations in data density, non-application of the rules or a different form-function relationship, as Pienemann suggested.
However, firstly, this piece of research was originally not undertaken to fit into a study within PT, as PT does not apply to the concept of language accuracy. Besides, on the basis of Pienemann’s (1998c) statement, gender is a lexical feature which should be discussed and acquired for every lexical item. Therefore, it has been stipulated that a learner’s ability to transfer grammatical information at the PT levels can be tested only if the gender assignment has been established for every item in the given learners’ lexicon. Yet, no explicit information has been provided in this perspective.
In addition, on the basis of a longitudinal study of six ESL learners, Dyson (2004) has investigated the proposals which have been made about variation in stages within the paradigm established by the MM. Dyson’s (2004) recent research has generated inconsistent evidence with PT, but this counter-evidence is, in fact, not reliable.
Dyson (2004) has addressed that one of his informants did not acquire the predicted morphology in the proposed trajectory, which falls short in the aspects of productive tokens and contexts. But he has proved that the output of the informants’ syntactic structures did follow the predicted route in PT. In this case, the ‘problematic issue’ occurred in the acquisition of morphology could be interpreted as a variety of causes. For instance, it could be due to a problem in research design. Dyson’s data collection lasted for 10 months with 6 data sessions. Therefore, there is no guarantee that the learners could or could not in fact present certain morphology in between the two data sessions, as Dyson (2004) has stated that the students may meet the acquisition criteria of different stages in the same sample. Also, as indicated in Dyson (2004), no contexts or a lack of contexts could lead to the absence of morphology in
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Looking at another aspect, Jordan’s (2004) evaluation of PT also contains a considerable number of critical points. The key concern of Jordan concentrated on the limited scope of the current format of PT and its hierarchical restriction. Pienemann responded to this issue with an extending theory of processability in Pienemann (2005). Since the original version of PT only presents the language development on the language itself, the whole scope of the extended PT, including the semantic role of the language, has been developed in a wider context.
To summarize, the criticism of PT could provide more explicit ideas for further examination and discussion. Some violated samples discovered in previous PT-based studies should be investigated from a more scientific perspective. Importantly, some of the above critiques have pointed out the weaknesses in PT and thus have stimulated the development of PT in different aspects.