acquisition of relative clauses in relation to langauge universals

john a. hawkins
2007

In East Asian languages, many structures called RCs should "be reclassified as attributive clauses." RCs "can be of different types--head-external, head-internal, or headless--and the precise grammar of each needs to be defined and contrasted with that of attributive clauses."

"Given an implicational universal of the form 'if a language has property P, then it has propoerty Q,' you cannot logically derive the prediction that property Q should be acquired before property P."

"...we can say that the predictions made by language universals for acquisition and interlanguages appear to hold, all things being equal. However, things might not always be equal!"

"In short,we need a predictive complex adaptive model of language acquisition."