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Interlanguage A-bar dependencies: binding construals, null prepositions and Universal Grammar

This article argues that the ‘null prep’ phenomenon discussed by Klein (1990; 1993; 1995) and Jourdain (1996) is a special case of a more general phenomenon in second language acquisition: the reliance on the A-bar binding strategy discussed by Rizzi (1990) and Cinque (1990). This strategy is employed even where both the L1 and the target language rely (primarily) on movement analyses. We present an analysis of additional English–French interlanguage data, complementing our analysis of Klein's and Jourdain's data. We argue that apparent categorial mismatches in A-bar chains may result from Preposition Incorporation. Although both movement analyses and binding construals are squarely within the UG-constrained hypothesis space, we suggest that learners may be driven to (nonmovement) binding construals to account for A-bar dependencies for reasons associated with online computational complexity, under the assumption that a nonmovement construal derived by Merge alone is less costly than one derived by Move (Chomsky, 1995).