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This thesis investigates the acquisition of sentential negation in English by three groups of bilingual Basque/Spanish speakers. All groups received instruction for a similar period of time, although they differ as to the age at which they began to learn English: four, eight and ten years respectively. The syntax of sentential negation concerns two main aspects: the nature of negative markers and the position of the negation phrase in the structure of the clause. Both Basque and Spanish have a negative marker that realizes the head of the negation phrase. The negation phrase in these languages dominates the tense phrase in the structure of the clause. On the contrary, in English the negative marker occupies the specifier position and the negation phrase appears lower than the tense phrase in the structure of the clause. The results of our analysis show a clear advantage in favor of the learners who began to learn English at eight and ten years old when compared to the younger ones. We have interpreted the differences between the groups as an attempt to adapt the lexical elements of English into the structures of their L1s. This interpretation is based on the learners' preferences with respect to the negative marker. Thus, younger learners show a clear preference for the marker of anaphoric negation no, whereas older learners prefer the morpheme n't, which appears together with auxiliary and modal verbs. In all cases, learners seem to be transferring the order of projections from their L1s and treating the lexical units isn't and don't as negative markers rather than as inflection markers followed by the negative morpheme n't, which leads us to conclude that there has not been a change in the order of projections but that these L2 learners are simply substituting one negative marker by another. |
