Negative concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English child language
Imke Driemel, Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilic, Paloma Jeretič, Astrid van Alem
July 2023 

Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation (Thornton et al. 2016, Nicolae and Yatsushiro 2020). Corpus-based investigations (Miller 2012, Thornton and Tesan 2013, Thornton et al. 2016, Nicolae and Yatsushiro 2020, Author et al. to appear) for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, Zeijlstra (2004, 2011), Penka (2007, 2011) and Deal (2022), as well as a movement-based approach (Blanchette 2015, Robinson and Thoms 2021) and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar (Guasti et al. 2023, Sauerland and Alexiadou 2020, 2021). We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007416 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Languages
keywords:	negative concord, negative indefinites, l1 acquisition, commission errors, upward agree, enrichment, impoverishment, meaning first, semantics, morphology, syntax
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