Abstract
The purpose of this short paper is to present some preliminary results from a study of the monolingual acquisition of the negative polarity item (NPI) any in English. These results are part of an ongoing research project that seeks to chart out the development of NPIs in English child language development. The working hypothesis is that children take a conservative approach to the acquisition of NPIs, following Snyder’s (2000) Grammatical Conservatism. According to Grammatical Conservatism, children are grammatically conservative, refraining from producing certain constructions until they have clear evidence of the grammatical options for that construction in their language. One observable result of this conservative strategy is the scarcity of “co-mission” errors (as opposed to omission errors) in child language. This paper is organized as follows. First, I present some background by introducing three claims from the semantics literature on NPI licensing. I then outline some of the predictions that such theoretical analyses, in conjunction with Grammatical Conservatism, make for child language acquisition, and describe the methodology used to test these predictions. Finally, I present some preliminary results from three children, and conclude the discussion.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 34), Online Proceedings Supplement, November 6-8, 2009, Boston University |
| Publisher | Cascadilla Press |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |
| Event | Boston University Conference on Language Development - Duration: 6 Nov 2009 → … |
Conference
| Conference | Boston University Conference on Language Development |
|---|---|
| Period | 6/11/09 → … |
Keywords
- English language
- language acquisition
- semantics
- children