This paper investigates German speakers of L2 Spanish and assesses their knowledge of (un)interpretable features linked to object drop in Spanish. Object drop involves an interpretable feature (i.e. definiteness) and uninterpretable features abiding by syntactic constraints leading to subjacency restrictions or Phase Impenetrability in recent Minimalist conceptions. Conversely, German argument omission is restricted to the topic position. This paper presents data from a production and grammaticality judgment task bearing on the acquisition of syntactic and semantic features associated with Spanish object drop, testing the plausibility of two prominent hypotheses, the Interpretability and Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. Results suggest that most L2 speakers have sensitivity to the D-related features associated with object-drop phenomena. Evidence lends strong favour to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis; the main findings suggest a lack of task effect for knowledge of interpretable features which can only be accounted for by said hypothesis.

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