Acquisition Of Negation In The Early Speech Of Mandarin-speaking Children: A Case Study

Negation is of vital importance in children's language system. Previous studies on the acquisition of negation are mainly concerning of two aspects—the first is the sequences of first appearances of the different notions of negation and the second is the syntactic placement of the negative particles in different constructions.The issue of children's acquisition of negation has been hotly debated by a group of linguists and different views have been aired on the issue. Although a great many linguists have contributed a lot on the acquisition of negation of Mandarin-speaking children, we find that throughout history the studies centered on the two questions mentioned above lack evidence provided by longitudinal data. In the aspect of acquisition of negative particles, we can find few support from naturalistic data; in the aspect of semantic development, we find that questions like whether children's acquisition of negative notions should have to follow certain rules are not answered; in the aspect of syntactic acquisition of negation, present data and discussion around syntactic development of negative construction and about how children's syntactic knowledge developed are quite insufficient.The paper based on a longitudinal data, explores the topic of the acquisition of negation of early speech of a two-year-and-a-half Mandarin-speaking child who lives in Changsha with a particular focus on the acquisition of negative particles, the notions of negation as well as the syntactic structures of negative constructions.We pick out child's utterances consisting negative particles and exclude some of the utterances according to the criteria we adopt. Based on the data, researches and observations have been carried out in the aspects of lexical, semantics and syntax, to explore the acquisition of negation in early language development of the Mandarin-speaking child. In the aspect of lexical acquisition of negation, we list out all the five negative particles appeared in the child's utterances; discuss the emergence time as well as the using frequency of each negative particle and the reasons accounted for it. In the aspect of semantic acquisition of negation, based on the definition and the classification of different notions of negation provided by the previous studies, we adopt eight commonly used negative notions, which have made appearance in LSY's data and we figure out the emergence time each negative notion, and the matching of different negative particles and negative notions. In the aspect of syntactic acquisition, we analyze the different negative constuctions that the child mainly adopts and the corresponding emergence time.We find that the Mandarin-speaking child begin to use the major negative particles of his mother tongue; that the negative particles which enjoys wider semantic field is acquired earlier than others; that the acquisition of negative constructions follow a certain rule. First, the negative constructions that the Mandarin child often uses in early language stage are centered on predicate verb; secondly, the acquisition on the knowledge of topic negation as well as the domain of negation is a developing process.