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operation of UG and the role of the L1 are summarized by White (2000, p. 148) in the following table:
Table 2. Summary of claims on UG availability and transfer.
| Full Transfer/Partial Access | No Transfer/Full Access | Full Transfer/Full Access | Partial Transfer/ Full Access | Partial Transfer/ Partial Access | |
| Initial state | L1 | UG | L1 | UG | Parts of UG and L1 |
| Grammar development | UG principles (via L1) | UG principles | UG principles | UG principles | (Some) UG principles |
| L1 parameter settings (+ local adjustments) | L2 parameter settings | Parameter resetting from L1 → L2/Ln | Parameter resetting from L1 → L2 | Parameters associated with functional features remain unspecified | |
| Possibility of “wild” grammars | No wild grammars | No wild grammars | No wild grammars | Locally wild grammars | |
| Final state | L1 (+ local adjustments) L2 not attainable | L2 | Ln (L2 possible but not inevitable) | L2 (Ln) | L2 not attainable |
Source. White (2000, p. 148).
Second, the very concept of “article-less language” may not mean the same thing for languages that have no article system. Less may mean none, without, completely different, or in the process of article emergence.In other words, article-less languages vary in possible equivalent forms, in possible emergence of new article forms, and in ways to encode semantic notions like definiteness, specificity, and partitivity. A noticeable case in point is Chinese, a language often lumped together with other article-less languages such as Czech, Finnish, Hindi, Indonesian,