Implications of Child Errors for the Syntax of Negation in Korean

Author: Hagstrom P.

Source: Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Volume 11, Number 3, July 2002 , pp. 211-242(32)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Children around age 2 acquiring Korean as a first language are well known for producing an error in which VP-internal material intervenes between the negator an and the verb, an order which is strictly ungrammatical in adult Korean. Children at the same age acquiring other languages make errors with subject case and with tense or agreement inflections on the verb, which has been analyzed by Wexler (1998) as stemming from a constraint on child grammars that prevents the subject from moving to two functional projections. The proposal here is that the child Korean errors result from the same constraint. This leads to an analysis of negation in adult Korean under which the VP material is base generated between the negator an and the verb, moving leftward in adult Korean. The child errors are then a result of omitting object-related functional projections that would drive this movement, paralleling Wexler's analysis of Optional Infinitives in other languages. The analysis presented here not only offers an explanation of the child errors but also constrains the possible analyses for negation in adult Korean in ways that are not obvious from the adult data alone.

Language: English

Document Type: Regular paper

Affiliations: 1: Department of Modern Foreign Languages & Literatures, Boston University, 718 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA E-mail: hagstrom@bu.edu

Publication date: 2002-07-01