The acquisition of the syntax of negation in French and German: contrasting first and second language development (original) (raw)
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The Acquisition of Negation in Italian
Languages, 2022
The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of negators and negative constructions, (b) the acquisition of negative functions and their varying proportion of use and (c) the emergence of negative concord constructions. Using the CHILDES database, the longitudinal data of four monolingual Italian children for an observation period from 1;07 to 3;04 years of age were extracted, and the negative utterances attested in their speech production were analyzed for both the single- and the multiword utterance period. Results show a consistent and progressive form–function development of negation, mainly in line with previous cross-linguistic literature but with some language-related features. M...
The evolution of negation in French and Italian: similarities and differences
Folia Linguistica, 2012
This article examines similarities and differences in the evolution of both standard clause negation and n-word negation in French and Italian. The two languages differ saliently in the extent to which standard negation features postverbal markers. We suggest that a convergence of phonetic, prosodic, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic changes in the evolution of French may explain why the grammaticalization of the postverbal marker is significantly more advanced in that language. Two types of n-word negation must be considered: (i) those where the n-word occurs postverbally, and (ii) those where an n-word is positioned preverbally. In the former type, French allows deletion of the preverbal marker, whereas Italian does so to a much lesser extent. In the second type, French allows (indeed, normatively demands) insertion of a second preverbal negative marker, whereas Italian does not. We suggest that this is attributable to the respective positive vs negative etymologies of the n-words. In type (i) constructions, this etymological difference appears to make Italian a negative-concord language from the outset. In contrast, negative concord in Modern French has, to a large extent, developed gradually out of what was originally a reinforcement of standard negation by positive items with scalar properties. Our analysis suggests that the pace and form of grammaticalization cannot be attributed to any single cause, but is rather the result of a confluence of formal and functional factors.
Two main characteristics of French negation are (i) that the language is a so-called Negative Concord (NC) language; and (ii) that French exhibits so-called embracing negation. NC refers to the phenomenon where multiple negative expressions yield only one negation. Embracing negation means that the language exhibits two negative markers, preverbal ne and postverbal pas, that embrace the finite verb. At first sight the two phenomena seem to behave on a par. Both in combination with French n-words and with French pas, ne may co-occur. But co-occurrence of pas with an n-word always yields a Double Negation (DN), i.e. a non-NC, reading. In this paper I argue that French n-words carry the same feature as n-words in other languages (following Zeijlstra (2004)): [uNEG]. However, I argue that French ne does not carry any formal feature and is a plain Negative Polarity Item (NPI). Due to the NPI status of ne it follows that ne cannot invoke the presence of an abstract negative operator as that is restricted to n-words only (by virtue of their [uNEG] feature). Moreover, it also follows why pas cannot establish an NC relation with n-word. Since cases of ne ... pas can no longer been seen as cases of syntactic agreement, these constructions cannot act as a cue for language learners to assign a formal negative feature to pas. Pas is thus only lexically and therefore semantically, but not formally (i.e. morphosyntactically) negative.
An alternative proposal for French negation
Linguistica Atlantica, 1999
In this paper, I propose an analysis of the negative expression (ne) pas 'not' in Modern Standard French, set within the minimalist program of , whose goal is to keep only principles no theory can do without (Hornstein 1994: 62ff.; see also Pollock 1997; etc. for introductions to the theoryJ1 The main characteristic of the present account is that it takes seriously the well-known fact that ne, traditionally thought of as the center of sentential negation, is no longer negative . Therefore, Pollock's (1989) influential proposal of a specific negative functional category NEGP headed by ne with pas in its SPEC has to be revised. I will focus only on French, and leave for further research how my proposal could be extended to account for the structure of negation in other languages, especially in other Romance languages (see .
Language Learning and Development, 2021
In English, a sentence like "The cat didn't eat the carrot or the pepper" typically receives a "neither" interpretation; in Japanese it receives a "not this or not that" interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the "neither" interpretation (strong reading) asymmetrically entails the "not this or not that" interpretation (weak reading). This asymmetrical entailment raises a learnability problem. According to the Semantic Subset Principle, all language learners, regardless of the language they are exposed to, start by assigning the strong reading, since this interpretation makes such sentences true in the narrowest range of circumstances.). If the "neither" interpretation is children's initial hypothesis, then children acquiring a superset language will be able to revise their initial hypothesis on the basis of positive evidence. The aim of the present study is to test an additional account proposed by Pagliarini, Crain, Guasti (2018) as a possible explanation for the earlier convergence to the adult grammar by Italian children. The hypothesis tested here is that the presence of a lexical form such as recursive né that unambiguously conveys a "neither" meaning, would lead children to converge earlier to the adult grammar due to a blocking effect of the recursive né form in the inventory of negated disjunction forms in a language. We compared data from Italian (taken from Pagliarini, Crain, Guasti, 2018), French, Hungarian and Dutch. Dutch was tested as baseline language. French and Hungarian have-similarly to Italian-a lexical form that unambiguously expresses the "neither" interpretation (ni ni and sem sem, respectively). Our results did not support this hypothesis however, and are discussed in the light of language-specific particularities of the syntax and semantics of negation.
Term Paper: An Analysis of ICLE Data This paper investigates the use of English negation in the interlanguage used by German learners of English as a foreign language.
Sentential Negation in English and Izon Languages
Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, Vol. 2, Issue 4 , 2020
This paper is a contrastive study of Sentential Negation in English and Izon languages. Contact language situations have given rise not only to the influences of one language over the other but also to the differences between the structures of the two languages in contact and the likely learning difficulties which an L1 learner of a second language may likely encounter in learning the structure of the L2. Thus, the data for this study were sourced from competent native speakers of the Ogbe-Ijo dialect of the Izon language and a contrastive approach was adopted using the Chomskyan's Government and Binding theory as a theoretical framework with a view to identifying the structural variations, hierarchy of difficulties and the likely learning problems an Izon learner of English as a second language may encounter at the level of Negation. It discovers that there were obvious parametric variations between the English and Izon languages at the levels of do insertion and the negative particle not among others. It then recommends that conscious efforts should be made by teachers and Izon learners / speakers of English as a second language at the level of realisation of negation in English as a second language.
Production and comprehension of sentence negation in child German
Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language, 2011
This research was carried out in the Center for individual development and adaptive education of children at risk (IDeA, chair M. Hasselhorn), funded by the federal state government of Hessen (LOEWE initiative).We thank the children, their parents, and the research assistants for gathering the data, and the Frankfurt language acquisition group for helpful support. In addition, we thank the two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and questions that helped clarify the ideas presented in this paper. 1. The children take part in the project MILA (The relation between migration background and language impairment in children's language achievement, Principal Investigator: Petra Schulz), which is part of the Research Center IDeA.
Frequency and the Evolution of French Negation
Unpublished term paper, 1998
Negation has long been a favorite topic of study for linguists, and French negation especially so, because of its distinctiveness among the more widely studied languages. In this study I will apply the principles of grammaticization theory, as regards in particular the effects of frequency (Bybee and Thompson 1997), to explain some of the events in the history of French negation. I will analyze a series of texts, mostly plays, drawn from the body of French literature, to show that the shift from preverbal to postverbal negation is an example of grammaticization, and that the spread of the “embracing negation” ne...pas is an example of analogical extension driven by high type frequency, and resisted by high token frequency constructions.