Chapter 13. Phonological features and phonetic variation in multilingual grammars

Drawing on Archibald (2022a, b), the chapter shows how a contrastive hierarchy model of segmental phonology can provide formal model of determining cross-linguistic similarity. Looking primarily at Arabic-French learners of English, the L1 and L2 features (including the markedness value of the feature) and the rankings influence L3 acquisition. Neurolinguistic and sociolinguistic evidence for the differential behaviour of marked versus unmarked values are discussed, and then it is shown how this variation can act as a cue for the learner to discover the L3 grammatical hierarchy. The author explores a theory of L3 restructuring based on principles of merger, redeployment, and triggering. Ultimately, it is argued that the learner compares the L1 and L2 contrastive hierarchy parses of the L3 input and chooses the one which is optimal for the L3 grammar.