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Acquiring the features of negative indefinites

A comparison of Catalan, Spanish and Italian with West Germanic

ORCiD logo with linkNúria Bosch | University of Cambridge
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Abstract
Corpus-based and experimental studies show that children acquiring non-Negative Concord (NC) languages often display NC-like behaviour, producing or interpreting sentences with two negatives as a single negation. Previous work has taken this as evidence that children initially posit a non-target NC grammar (e.g., Sano, T., H. Shimada, T. Kato, J. Crawford, K. Otaki & M. Takahashi. 2009. Negative concord vs. negative polarity and the acquisition of Japanese. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 3), 232–240.; Thornton, R., A. Notley, V. Moscati & S. Crain. 2016. Two negations for the price of one. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1(1). 1–30.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Nicolae, A. C. & K. Yatsushiro. 2022. Not eating Kein veggies: Negative concord in child German. In R. Hörnig, S. von Wietersheim, A. Konietzko & S. Featherston (eds.), Proceedings of linguistic evidence 2020, 317–332. Tübingen: University of Tübingen.; Driemel, I., J. Hein, C. Bill, A. Gonzalez, I. Ilić, P. Jeretič & A. van Alem. 2023. Negative concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English child language. Languages 8(3). 179. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Illingworth, C., J. D. Kang, H. Gibbs, K. Davidson & R. Feiman. 2025. When the syntactic bootstrap breaks: Some children think any means no. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 10(1). . https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.18974.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The empirical basis for this claim is, however, largely based on Double Negation systems, especially Germanic. This paper presents the first corpus study of NC and negative indefinites in Catalan and Spanish, supplemented by existing and new Italian data. Comparison with Romance and Germanic reveals differences in error rates, age of emergence, and error types, providing evidence that challenges the view that NC is children’s ‘developmental default’. I argue that these findings are more readily captured under Zeijlstra, H. 2004. Sentential negation and negative concord: University of Amsterdam dissertation.’s (Zeijlstra, H. 2004. Sentential negation and negative concord: University of Amsterdam dissertation.) Agree-based approach to NC.
Article outline
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Background
    • 2.1 Negative Concord and Double Negation
      • 2.1.1 Typological overview
      • 2.1.2 (Some) theoretical analyses of Double Negation and Negative Concord languages
    • 2.2 Acquisition of negative indefinites
  • 3 The corpus study
    • 3.1 Methodology
    • 3.2 Results
    • 3.3 Interim summary
    • 3.4 Comparison with West Germanic
      • 3.4.1 Error rates and error emergence in Germanic vs. Romance production
      • 3.4.2 Isolated uses of negative indefinites: a typologically-conditioned asymmetry
  • 4 Discussion and analysis
  • 5 Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (94)
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