Lydia White
Lydia White is a James McGill Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at McGill University, where she built one of the most sustained research programmes in generative SLA. Trained at Cambridge (BA, Moral Sciences and Psychology, 1969) and McGill (PhD, Linguistics, 1980), she spent her career arguing, patiently and empirically, that adult second-language grammars are shaped by Universal Grammar.
Her Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar (2003) is the standard graduate-level reference for the UG-in-SLA tradition. The argument is careful rather than polemical: learners display knowledge that cannot be derived from the L2 input alone, and that residue — poverty-of-stimulus effects, parameter resetting, subtle grammaticality judgements — is the evidentiary footprint of innate linguistic knowledge. Where Krashen's acquisition story gestured at an innate module, White turned it into a programme of experiments.
Career
- BA, Cambridge (1969); PhD, McGill (1980)
- Career at McGill University, culminating in the James McGill Professorship
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Arts and Humanities, 2010)
- Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012)
Published Work
- Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar (2003, Cambridge)
- Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition (1989, Benjamins)
- Decades of experimental papers on L2 syntax, parameter-setting, and near-native attainment
- Co-editor, Language Acquisition and Language Disorders book series
Influence
- Anchored the generative tradition inside SLA through an era when the field was drifting toward cognitive and sociocultural frames
- Trained and mentored a generation of generative L2 researchers including Suzanne Flynn, Bonnie Schwartz, and Antonella Sorace as peers and collaborators
- A frequent foil for emergentist and usage-based accounts, which define themselves partly in contrast to her programme