ABSTRACT
Where do grammars come from? In Chapter 3, we encountered theorists whose main concern was this particular question, and who have argued that because of its complexity as a formal system, the natural grammar of human language cannot be learnt in its entirety, from scratch, by each individual human being, but must at least to some extent be innate. We went on to examine the work of a range of second language acquisition researchers who see as their central interest the understanding of how this inbuilt system and associated processing mechanisms develop in second language learners.
