Not eating kein veggies: negative concord in child German
Andreea Nicolae, Kazuko Yatsushiro
November 2020 

In this paper, we tested the hypothesis that standard German children’s interpretation of sentences with two negative expressions resembles that of adult speakers, namely, as doubly negated sentences. This hypothesis is based on the previous observation by Thornton et al. (2016) that English speaking children show concord relations between two negations. They attribute this result to the fact that English has both a negative head (n’t) and a negative adverbial (not). Following Zeijlstra (2008), they assume that availability of a negative head is crucial for negative concord to exist. Since German nicht is an adverbial and there is no other sentential negation, we predicted that standard-German speaking children should not show concord between multiple negative expressions. Our experiment shows that this hypothesis is not supported, however, making it less likely that the availability of a negative head in the language determines children’s interpretation of sentences with multiple negative expressions. Despite the fact that the adult language can be described as a double negation language, child participants in our study comprehended two-negation sentences as conveying one negation, unlike adults. The source of negative concord-like behavior in children can thus not be due to the structural position of negation (the proposed account for English). Our proposal is that negative concord is the default setting and that is why both English and German speaking children go through the negative concord stage.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005576 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	to appear in the proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2020
keywords:	negative concord, double negation, child language, german, semantics
Downloaded:	509 times

 

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