Introduction : on the initial stages of language acquisition / Teun Hoekstra & Bonnie Schwartz -- VP, null arguments, and COMP projections / Nina Hyams -- Crosslinguistic evidence for functional projections in early child grammar / Vivian Deprez & Amy Pierce -- The seeds of structure : a syntactic analysis of the acquisition of case marking / Harald Clahsen, Sonja Eisenbeiss & Anne Vainikka -- From adjunct to head / Teun Hoekstra & Peter Jordens -- Early null subjects and root null subjects / Luigi Rizzi -- Asking questions without CPs? : on the acquisition of root wh-questions in Bernese Swiss German and Standard German / Zvi Penner -- Successful cyclic movement / Rosalind Thornton & Stephen Crain -- Early acquisition of scrambling in Japanese / Yukio Otsu -- Direct access to X'-theory : evidence from Korean and Turkish adults learning German / Anne Vainikka & Martha Young-Scholten -- Word order and nominative case in non-native language acquisition : a longitudinal study of (L1 Turkish) German interlanguage / Bonnie D. Schwartz & Rex A. Sprouse -- Optionality and the initial state in L2 development / Lynn Eubank.