Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language

Driemel, Imke; Hein, Johannes; Bill, Cory; Gonzalez, Aurore; Ilić, Ivona; Jeretič, Paloma; van Alem, Astrid

doi:10.3390/languages8030179

Open AccessArticle

Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language

by

Imke Driemel

^1,*,†

,

Johannes Hein

^1,*,†

,

Cory Bill

²

,

Aurore Gonzalez

³

,

Ivona Ilić

¹,

Paloma Jeretič

² and

Astrid van Alem

⁴

¹

Department of German Studies and Linguistics, Humboldt University of Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany

²

Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), 10719 Berlin, Germany

³

Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy

⁴

Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany

^*

Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.

^†

These authors contributed equally to this work.

Languages 2023, 8(3), 179; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8030179

Submission received: 15 September 2022 / Revised: 3 July 2023 / Accepted: 4 July 2023 / Published: 26 July 2023

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Errors of Commission in Child Language)

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Abstract

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. Corpus-based investigations 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, as well as a movement-based approach 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. 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.

Keywords: negative concord; negative indefinites; L1 acquisition; commission errors; Upward Agree; enrichment; impoverishment; Meaning First

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MDPI and ACS Style

Driemel, I.; Hein, J.; Bill, C.; Gonzalez, A.; Ilić, I.; Jeretič, P.; van Alem, A. Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language. Languages 2023, 8, 179. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8030179

AMA Style

Driemel I, Hein J, Bill C, Gonzalez A, Ilić I, Jeretič P, van Alem A. Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language. Languages. 2023; 8(3):179. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8030179

Chicago/Turabian Style

Driemel, Imke, Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilić, Paloma Jeretič, and Astrid van Alem. 2023. "Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language" Languages 8, no. 3: 179. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8030179

APA Style

Driemel, I., Hein, J., Bill, C., Gonzalez, A., Ilić, I., Jeretič, P., & van Alem, A. (2023). Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language. Languages, 8(3), 179. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8030179

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Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language

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