LING 822: Seminar on Language Acquisition

The Acquisition of Negation

T 1:00-3:30 3031 Dole

Instructor: Clifton Pye (pyersqr at ku dot edu)

Office Hours: M 1:00-3:00 or by appointment

      This seminar will survey the literature on the acquisition of negation with the goal of distinguishing results that are specific to English from those with broad cross-linguistic support. The adult use of negation interacts with discourse, syntactic and semantic features, and its acquisition is markedly delayed relative to the acquisition of other tense and agreement features. Negation displays a great deal of cross-linguistic variation and historical change. This variation and change has significant implications for parameter-setting accounts of language acquisition and Universal Grammar. The seminar will focus on the acquisition of negation in the Germanic, Romance and Mayan languages.

      The seminar will consist of class discussions of the assigned readings and their implications for the acquisition of negation. Each student will be responsible for leading the class discussion on a particular reading. In addition to the reading and class discussion each student is required to write a paper discussing the acquisition of some aspect of negation. The paper might examine, for example, the relation between finiteness and negation in a specific language. The seminar will be organized as a workshop. Students will present a preliminary version of their paper in class, and refine their concepts through class discussion. They will then be asked to present a final revision of their paper that incorporates suggestions from the class and the instructor.

Required Textbook

G. Mazzon. 2004. A History of English Negation. New York: Pearson-Longman.

Readings

Additional Readings

Negation in the world’s languages

Budd, Peter. 2010. Negation in Bierebo and the Other Languages of Epi, Central Vanuatu. Oceanic Linguistics 49(2): 511-542.

William Croft. 1991. The Evolution of Negation. Journal of Linguistics 27:1-27.

Östen Dahl. 1979. Typology of sentence negation. Linguistics 17:79-106.

Durbin, Marshall and Ojeda, Fernando. 1978. Negation in Yucatec Maya. Journal of Mayan Linguistics 1:53-60.

Liliane Haegeman. 1995. The Syntax of Negation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laurence R. Horn. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Jong-Bok Kim. 2000. The Grammar of Negation: A Constraint-Based Approach. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

John R. Payne. 1985. Negation. In Timothy Shopen (ed), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. I: Clause Structure, 197-242. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cycles of negation

Hoeksema, Jack. 2009. Jespersen recycled. In Elly van Gelderen, (ed.), Cyclical Change, 15- 34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Mazzon, Gabriella. 2004. A History of English Negation. Harlow, UK: Longman.

van der Auwera, Johan. 2009. The Jespersen Cycles. In Elly van Gelderen, (ed.), Cyclical Change, 35-71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

The acquisition of negation

Babarczy, Anna. 2006. Negation and word order in Hungarian child language. Lingua 116: 377–392.

Cameron-Faulkner, Thea, Elena Lieven & Anna Theakston. 2007. What part of no do children not understand? A usage-based account of multiword negation. Journal of Child Language 33: 251-282.

Capdevila i Batet, Montserrat & Mireia Llinàs i Grau. 1995. The acquisition of negation in English. Atlantis 17. 27–44.

Choi, S. 1988. The semantic development of negation: a cross-linguistic longitudinal study. Journal of Child Language 15: 517–31.

Déprez, Viviane & Amy Pierce. 1993. Negation and functional projections in early grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 24:25-67.

Drozd, Kenneth. 1995. Child English pre-sentential negation as metalinguistic exclamatory negation. Journal of Child Language 22:583-610.

Drozd, Kenneth F. 2001. “Metalinguistic Sentence Negation in Child English,” in J. Hoeksema, H. Rullman, V. Sánchez-Valencia, and T. van der Wouden, eds., Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Guasti, Maria Teresa, Rosalind Thornton & Kenneth Wexler. 1995. Negation in children’s questions: The case of English. In Dawn MacLaughlin & Susan McEwen (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 19], 228–239. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Hamann, Cornelia. 2002. From Syntax to Discourse. Chapter 10: Other areas of investigation: negation and late argument drop. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Klima, E. S. & Bellugi, U. 1966. Syntactic regularities in the speech of children. In J. Lyons & R. J. Wales (ed.), Psycholinguistics papers, 183–208. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

McNeill, David. 1971. The capacity for the ontogenesis of grammar. In Dan I. Slobin (ed.), The Ontogenesis of Grammar: A Theoretical Symposium, 17-40. New York: Academic Press.

Schütze, Carson T. 2010. The Status of Nonagreeing Don’t and Theories of Root Infinitives. Language Acquisition 17(4): 235—271.

Wexler, Kenneth, Carson T. Schütze & Mabel Rice. 1998. Subject case in children with SLI and unaffected controls: Evidence for the Agr/Tense Omission Model. Language Acquisition 7: 317–344.

Wode, H. (1977). Four early stages in the development of L1 negation. Journal of Child Language 4, 87–102.