One Feature—One Head: Features as Functional Heads in Language Acquisition and Attrition

This chapter explores the ramifications of envisaging an architecture of syntax in which each functional projection (head) consists of only one singleton feature. Following Kayne, (2005), I refer to this as the One Feature—One Head (1F1H) architecture. Beyond providing a sketch of the core desiderata associated with this architecture, I discuss how L1 and L2 acquisition would take place within the 1F1H-architecture, demonstrating that analyses undertaken in the Feature Reassembly-model can be directly subsumed into this architecture in a straightforward and conceptually appealing way. Finally, I turn my attention to language attrition, addressing how the 1F1H-architecture adopts a version of Scontras et al.’s, (2018) call for representational economy in the grammatical representations of languages affected by attrition (see also Putnam et al., 2019).