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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2015

Forms and Functions of Early Utterance Negation

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Forms and Functions of Early Utterance Negation: a Developmental Study In previous research, negation has been described as one of the first grammatical markers children acquire. Three successive periods are differentiated in children’s syntactic development of negation (Bellugi 1967, Bloom 1970, 1991; Choi 1988; Klima and Bellugi 2004; Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2007): -Period 1: the markers of negation - no and not - are used to form utterances that follow this pattern: , (“no teddy”). -Period 2: the negation is included in the utterance and generally supported by the auxiliary verbs DO or CAN, which only appear in the negative form. The structural pattern for period 2 is the following: , (“I don’t know”). -Period 3: negative auxiliary verbs are no longer limited to don’t and can’t and they all appear in declarative utterances and questions (Bellugi 1967; Klima & Bellugi 2004). Yet, Bellugi only focused on the syntactic form of children’s utterances and to analyze children’s early utterance productions, it is crucial to work on the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic interface. Indeed, Werner and Kaplan (1963) and Slobin (1973) observed that form-function relationships play an essential part in language acquisition because new functions in children’s repertoire are first expressed through old and available forms and when new forms develop, they will serve the new function better than the older forms. Moreover, as Vicente (2010) argued for the adversative conjunction but, children’s syntactically fragmentary negative utterances could be interpreted with the support of contextual pragmatic information. The present paper investigates the development of the syntactic forms along with the semantic values of negative utterances, within a pragmatic and constructivist approach (Tomasello 2000, 2003; Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2003). We conducted analyses on an English-speaking girl, Ellie, filmed monthly in spontaneous interaction with her mother from the ages of ten months to four. We coded an overall of 430 negative utterances produced by the child and 1446 by the mother. We classified the child’s utterances into periods 1, 2 or 3 according to the syntactic form and the semantic value of the sentence and the context in which they were produced. Among these utterances we excluded cases of anaphoric negation because the negator does not relate to the lexical item in the utterance but instead, to the previous utterance produced by the adult as when the mother says “it is Ellie’s chair” and the child answer “no baby” (Wode 1977). To differentiate the different functions of negation, we used Choi’s (1988) and Cameron-Faulkner et al.’s (2007) typologies specifically developed to classify children’s early productions of negation. In order to analyze the forms Ellie was exposed to, we coded her mother’s negative utterances using the same methodology. Results show that Ellie’s first negative utterances appear at 1;09 and their number constantly increases over the three periods. From 1;09 to 4;02, Ellie produces 51 , 115 and 172 utterances. -During period 1 – 1;09 to 2;00 – the negation marker precedes the rest of the utterance as in “no shoe”. The negation values Ellie expresses are first absence/non-existence then rejection and denial. -During period 2 – 2;05 to 3;00 – the negation marker is included in the utterances; either an auxiliary verb bears the negation or the negation follows a lexical verb as in “Daddy likes not airplane”. The set of semantic values for negation develops and includes epistemic negation and incapacity. In the data, we coded an overall of 28 utterances and 69 . -During period 3 – 3;01 to 4;00 – Ellie uses BE and HAVE as auxiliary verbs and starts expressing tenses. Negative assertion is the semantic value she uses the most. Ellie’s mother produces 474 , 709 and 134 utterances. During period 1, she mostly produces and utterances but during periods 2 and 3, we observe a steady increase of structures. In children’s production of early utterance negation, syntactic forms must be analyzed in relation to their semantic and pragmatic functions. As this study illustrates, the development of utterance negation in children is grounded in form-function relationships, their cognitive development and the language they are exposed to. References: Bellugi, U. 1967. A transformational analysis of the development of negation, Unpublished thesis manuscript, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Bloom, L. 1970. Language development: Form and function emerging grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloom, L. 1991. Language development from two to three. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron-Faulkner, T., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. 2003. A construction based analysis of child directed speech. Cognitive Science, 27, 843–873. Cameron-Faulkner, T., E. Lieven, and A. L. Theakston. 2007. What part of no do children not understand? A usage-based account of multiword negation. Journal of Child Language. 33:251-282. Choi, S. 1988. The semantic development of negation: across-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language. 15:517-532. Klima, E.S., & Bellugi-Klima, U. 2004. Syntactic regularities in the speech of children. In B. Lust & C. Foley (Eds.), First Language Acquisition: The Essential Readings, pp. 344-366, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. (Reprinted from: Psycholinguistic papers, pp. 183-208, in J. Lyons & R.J. Wales (Eds.) Tomasello, M. 2000. Do children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74, 209–253. Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vicente, L. 2010. On the Syntax of Adversative Coordination. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, vol. 28 (2), 381-415. Wode, H. (1977), Four early stages in the development of L1 negation. Journal of Child Language 4, 87-102.
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halshs-01162291, version 1 (10-06-2015)

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Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel, Aliyah Morgenstern. Forms and Functions of Early Utterance Negation: A Developmental Study. The pragmatics of grammar: negation and polarity, Pierre Larrivée, May 2015, Caen, France. ⟨halshs-01162291⟩
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