Conclusions

In this concluding chapter we consider our results in the larger frameworks of multilingualism and language change and show that these areas cohere. We consult an ongoing program of study of the acquisition of multilingualism and report results documenting both structural constraint on the multilingual course of acquisition of relativization and the integration of principles of language-specific grammar. The results reported in this book reflect general properties of language acquisition and are not limited to the child or to monolingual contexts alone. We relate our results regarding the nature of language change in acquisition to that of language change in historical contexts and argue that a gradual integration of linguistic knowledge culminates in the creation of a linguistic system over time in both contexts. Finally, we consult a more refined notion of “recursion,” and in keeping with recent theoretical developments in the implementation of recursion in Universal Grammar, we reject a claim that the developmental results in this book reflect an absence of recursion in early child language. We describe the implications of our results on the acquisition of relativization for our understanding of the Language Faculty in the human species.