Universität zu Köln, Philosophische Fakultät
Hauptseminar: Language Acquisition
Wintersemester 2005/2006

On the acquisition of negation: what role does UG play
in first and second language acquisition?

by

Lars Berghaus

Contents

Introduction 1

Part I The syntax of negation in different languages 2

English 2

German 4

French 5

Part II First Language Acquisition 6

Acquisition of negation in Spanish, French and German 8

Acquisition of negation in English 8

Part III Second Language Acquisition 10

Conclusion 13

Bibliography 15

Introduction

This Friday admired much; but when he came to taste the flesh, he took so many ways to tell me how well he liked it, that I could not but understand him … Friday began to talk pretty well, and understand the names of almost everything … And having learned him English so well that he could answer me almost any question … we began the following discourse …:
Master: But why did not your side recover you from the hands of your enemies, then?
Friday: They run one, two, three, and me, and make go in the canoe; my nation have no canoe that time. …
(from Robinson Crusoe, 232-234, bold print mine)

The ability to learn and produce natural language and move beyond the communication of sign and body language is unique to human beings. The acquisition of language is possible since grammar is assumed to be universal. Universal Grammar (UG) defines properties of language itself. CHOMSKY’S theory of grammar is constrained, first, by universal grammatical principles which determine the broad outline of grammar and are generally true and, second, by grammatical parameters which are language-specific dimensions of a particular language and allow crosslinguistic variation. The first doesn’t have to be learned since it is part of the innate language faculty; the latter needs to be acquired and is assumed to be linked to individual items in the lexicon (CAPDEVILA I BATET ET AL. 1995, 31). The central task of acquisition is thus the construction of the grammar of the target language, in other words, the setting of parameters, which is also referred to as grammatical learning (versus lexical learning).
One of the parameters that needs to be set is the construction of negation. In this paper, I look at the nature and operation of negation (part I) and how children and adults acquire it during their first and second language acquisition process of different languages (parts II and III). Moreover, underlying principles and mechanisms of L1 and L2 acquisition will be discussed and compared. I want to investigate the way in which the principles and parameters of UG (do not) operate over time as the individual’s grammar gradually develops and find out if the children’s and adults’ grammars conform to these.
An individual acquiring L1 has to access the innate grammatical principals of UG in the initial state and learn the language-specific grammatical parameters. L1 acquisition is rapid, uniform and almost error-free. How the acquisition of negation for an L1-learner develops will be presented in the second part.
L2-learners have already learned an L1 and are expected to be competent users of the specific grammar of their first language. They learn a second language, i.e. determine a new setting for relevant grammatical parameters in order to arrive at a linguistic system of the target L2. Their acquisition is characterized by great variability crosslinguistically and across individual learners (MEISEL 1997, 227). Part 3 looks at 2LA of negation and wants to describe whether 1LA and 2LA share similarities and if UG plays a role in 2LA.

Part I The syntax of negation in different languages

In this section, I will briefly review the negation of the main languages in question, namely English, German and (Colloquial) French. Not only do the negative elements vary from language to language, but also their position and possibly their origin and movements within the sentences.

English

English knows three negative forms: no, not and n’t of which the later is the cliticization of the second. No is used as a single-word negation, i.e. a quantificational negation (1), or as an anaphoric negation negating a previous statement (2). Not and n’t, respectively, are sentential negations in which the entire sentence is negated (3) (SCHELLETTER 2000, 106; STROMWOLD ET AL. 1998, 235).

(1) There is no milk left.
(2) Do you want to go to the mall? – No, I want to go to the movies.
(3) I do not (don’t) want to go to the movies.

The word order in English is SVO and the underlying position of the verb is VP initial. To understand the position and origin of subject and negator, the VP-internal Subject Hypothesis will be taken into account. The subject NP within a sentence is generated within the maximal projection of the verb, namely SpecVP, and is then raised to SpecIP where it surfaces. The negation of a sentence has its own constituent in the sentence structure, namely NegP, which dominates VP but is subject to IP (see (4)):

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