Interpreting (un)interpretability

Abstract

Our target article (henceforth W&B) proposed a diachronic connection between a structural property of grammars and particular sociohistorical situations: all else being equal, we predict that in sociohistorical situations in which adult L2 learners are particularly dominant quantitatively or qualitatively, uninterpretable features will typically be lost. W&B outlines a research programme rather than a full-fledged knockdown argument, and we thank BIBERAUER, VAN GELDEREN and YANOVICH for reading it in the spirit it was intended and raising important issues in their commentaries. For space reasons we cannot respond to all of these, of course. In Section 2, we address questions of innateness. In Section 3 we discuss the characterization of (un)interpretability. Section 4 addresses the specific issues to do with our analysis of negation. Section 5 revisits the contact scenarios involved. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.