Are Grammatical Morphemes Hard or Soft?

Abstract

For the past few decades, one of the most persistent criticisms against second language acquisition (SLA) research has been the derivative nature of its origin in establishing its theoretical and methodological foundation. That being the case, the phenomenon of fossilization, i.e., the cessation of learning in a second language (L2), has been a central interest of study unique to the field of SLA, to which most, if not all, hypotheses and research on adult L2 learning are ultimately linked. In this connection, the Selective Fossilization Hypothesis (SFH) proposed by Han (2009) demonstrates its potential to account for a wide spectrum of issues related to fossilization, thus deepening our understanding of SLA in general and fossilization in particular. Simply put, the SFH is promising in that it not only accounts for the previous research findings a posteriori, but also predicts selectively fossilizable features a priori on the basis of the interaction of first language (L1) markedness and L2 input robustness.