It has been observed that adult L2 learners generally fail to acquire a second language in spite of the effort and the time
they put into this task during the acquisition process. One account for this phenomenon is that UG is no longer available in adult L2 acquisition. More recently, proposals have been put forward within the framework of Minimalist Program to account for the acquisition failure of L2 learners. These include Eubank's (1993/94, 1994, 1996) Valueless Features Hypothesis, Beck's (1997, 1998a,b) Local Impairment Hypothesis & Hawkins' (1998, Hawkins & Chan 1997) Failed Features Hypothesis. In this paper, I will review these L2 acquisition hypotheses and present empirical data from both Chinese speaking learners of English and English , French , and German speaking learners of Chinese to show that features attached to
functional categories in adult L2 acquisition can be fully and properly specified and that functional categories may not necessarily be the cause of failure in second language acquisition.