Abstract

A central assumption within the minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995) is that lexical items are bundles of grammatical, semantic and phonetic features, and that the syntactic objects generated by the language faculty are nothing more than rearrangements of features selected from the lexicon. In this perspective, second language acquisition reduces to the task of acquiring the language specific grammatical, semantic and phonetic specifications of vocabulary items, the abstract morphological features of functional categories, and rules of morpho-syntactic mapping (van Hout et al. 2003). Applying computerized language analysis software to a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous oral productions of adult Jamaican learners of French in a guided environment, I analyse the development of a multi-functional lexical item, the preposition “pour” (for, in order to), in the interlanguage of an individual learner. Interested in the effects that the rich language background of Creole societies has on L2 acquisition, I emphasize the transfer influence from the native system (Jamaican Creole (JC) – Standard Jamaican English (SJE) continuum) in the acquisition of this item, and suggest possible avenues of remediation concerning classroom instructed learning.