2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

With the production of longer utterances, simple structures are elaborated to yield more complex ones. Negative sentences, question forms, passives, and relative clauses are just a few of the many complex rules that children acquire in their first five years. (Rules are used here in a general sense and may be interpreted as principles, parameters, limits, etc. Chomskyan theory is by no means necessarily implied by the use of these terms.) Although many other rules are also being acquired, we will select for consideration the complex rules used in forming negations, questions, relative clauses, and passives. Since this is the general order of acquisition of structures, we will use this order in presenting these constructions. It should be borne in mind, however, that the learning of some of these constructions sometimes overlaps, such as in the case of negation and question, which share a number of grammatical features.

1.1.1.1       Negation formation

Negation development

Before presenting some of the acquisition data concerning negation, it may be useful to review some of the features of the negation process.

Let us consider some sentences and their negations.

1a.  Affirmative:                     Kim is hungry.

1b. Negative:                          Kim is not hungry. 1c.  Negative Contraction: Kim isn’t hungry.

2a.  Affirmative:                     Kim wanted some candy.

2b. Negative:                          Kim did not want any candy. 2c.  Negative Contraction:  Kim didn’t want any candy.

Features of negation

In learning to produce these negations, the child must learn a number of different things. In considering these features, let us make negative the affirmative sentence of:

Kim wanted some candy.

1.    Where to insert the negative marker.

(a)        If the verb is ‘be’, then NEG is placed after the Copula ‘be’ form. Thus, ‘Kim is NEG happy’ becomes ‘Kim is not happy’.

(b)       If the verb is not ‘be’, then ‘not’ is placed before the verb. Thus, Kim not want + PAST some candy.

2.    When and where to insert auxiliary ‘do’.

Insert ‘do’ when the verb is one other than ‘be’ (‘have’ is a special verb,

e.g. ‘Kim did not have any money’ and ‘Kim had no money’, which will not be considered here). Thus, we get

Kim do not want + PAST some candy.

‘Do’ is not inserted if there is a modal (will, can) or auxiliary (be, have) present, as in ‘Kim will not want to go’.

3.    When auxiliary ‘do’ is used, then the tense from the verb is shifted to the auxiliary ‘do’. Thus, from ‘Kim do not want + PAST . . .’, we get

Kim do + PAST not want some candy.

Then, lexicalization (the asterisk here and elsewhere indicates ungrammaticality):

* Kim did not want some candy.

4.    In English, Lexical Concordances must be made in the case of the negative,

e.g. ‘some’ must change to ‘any’ so as to yield the grammatical Kim did not want any candy.

5.    Optionally, AUX + NEG (‘did’ + ‘not’) can be contracted to ‘didn’t’. This

would provide us with

Kim didn’t want any candy.

The above features of negation must be taken into account by any theory of grammar. While in the above example, for simplicity’s sake, operations were applied to an affirmative sentence, a semantic or conceptual representa- tion of such a sentence can (and should) be the point of origin. Negation features therefore may include meaning terms. The surface string of words must be the same whatever theory of grammar is being considered, as must be the features of negation.

Negation is one of the earliest sentence structure rules acquired by children. According to the classic research of Klima and Bellugi (1966) and others

who later replicated their work, there is a consistent pattern in this, with negation being acquired in three main periods. Sample sentences and their analysis follow below for each period. Incidentally, these data are taken from the same three children whose morpheme acquisition was described above in the Brown study.

Period 1

‘No money’; ‘Not a teddy bear’; ‘No play that’; ‘No fall’; ‘No the sun shining’; ‘No singing song’

In this, the earliest period, a negation marker (NEG), in the form of ‘no’  or ‘not’, is placed at the front of an affirmative utterance (U). Thus we see utterances typically of the form, Neg + U (‘No fall’). Children everywhere seem to use much the same pattern in early acquisition of negation. French children place non or pas before U (Grégoire, 1937), while Japanese children place the Japanese negative marker nai after the U (U + Neg) in accordance with the structure of their language (McNeill and McNeill, 1968).

Period 2

‘I don’t want it’; ‘I don’t know his name’; ‘We can’t talk’; ‘You can’t dance’; ‘Book say no’; ‘Touch the snow no’; ‘That no Mommy’; ‘There no squirrels’; ‘He no bite you’; ‘I no want envelope’

In this second period, the negative marker tends to appear internally within the utterance rather than outside it as in the previous period, and the auxiliaries ‘do’ and ‘can’ appear with the negation marker. Klima and Bellugi believe that children treat ‘don’t’ and ‘can’t’ as single words and do not analyze them as Aux + Neg. That the uncontracted forms of ‘do’ and ‘can’ do not appear in the data is one telling argument that they present in support of their view. Utterances are still of a rather crude nature, though, and negative imperatives, ‘Touch the snow no’ (‘Don’t touch the snow’), are as poorly formed as they were in the previous period (‘No play that’ (‘Don’t play with that’), ‘No fall’ (‘Don’t fall’, in one interpretation)).

Period 3

‘Paul can’t have one’; ‘This can’t stick’; ‘I didn’t did it’; ‘You didn’t caught me’; ‘Cause he won’t talk’; ‘Donna won’t let go’; ‘I am not a doctor’; ‘This not ice cream’; ‘Paul not tired’; ‘I not hurt him’; ‘I not see you anymore’; ‘Don’t touch the fish’; ‘Don’t kick my box’

In this third period, the period before which perfect negatives are formed, the Copula ‘be’ (‘am not’) and the modal ‘will’ (‘won’t’) appear with nega- tion and imperative negatives are formed with ‘do’ rather than the simple negative (‘Don’t touch the fish’ as opposed to ‘Touch the snow no’ in earlier periods). The child now has a good idea of when ‘do’ must be inserted