Scope, syntax, and prosody in Russian as a second or heritage language

The study of second language (L2) acquisition from the generative perspective has, traditionally, focused primarily on narrow syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena (for an overview, see, e.g., Ionin, 2012; White, 2003). The last two decades have seen a rise in L2 studies that address phenomena at the syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics interfaces, investigating such topics as grammatical tense and aspect, scope ambiguity, article semantics, and the interpretation of overt vs. null pronouns, among others (for an overview, see Slabakova, 2008, 2016). Across both (morpho)syntactic and interface phenomena, studies find evidence of crosslinguistic influence (transfer) from the learners’ first language (L1), but also find that learners are able to acquire novel properties of their L2 that are not present in their L1 and that are often underdetermined in the input (see Schwartz & Sprouse, 2013; Slabakova, 2016).