Modifying the Teaching of Modifiers: A Lesson from Universal Grammar

This chapter considers the implications for classroom teaching and materials development of recent research on the second language acquisition of modifiers, specifically regarding word order of prepositional modifiers (e.g., right back into the desert) and attributive adjectives (e.g., great new haircut). While word order of prepositional modifiers is generally not taught in the classroom, adjectival hierarchies in contrast are covered by most ESL grammar series, although never systematically. Universal orderings of prepositional modifiers (Stringer D, Burghardt B, Seo H-K, Wang Y-T. Sec Lang Res 27:289–311, 2011) and adjectives (Cinque G. The syntax of adjectives. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010) raise the question of whether orderings of modifiers need to be taught at all, or whether such hierarchies might be naturally manifested without explicit instruction. Results from experimentation targeting the acquisition of prepositional modifiers reveal innate knowledge of the syntax of modification and suggest that teaching materials should focus on the lexicon rather than word order in this domain. In contrast, results from experiments on acquisition of adjective order suggest that while a more general distinction (absolute vs. nonabsolute) may be universal, more fine-grained distinctions are poorly understood by learners even at advanced proficiency levels, regardless of first language background, and require the development of more effective teaching of word order, plausibly though enhanced input.