In the SLA literature, the study of English negation offers a good example of systematic, non-linear and unevenly paced development along predictable stages. I will illustrate the stages here with longitudinal data from Jorge, a young English L2 user investigated by Cancino et al. (1978) and also by Stauble (1978). The ten- month developmental pathway towards his acquisition of English negation is depicted in Table 6.2.
Jorge was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in an upper-middle-class family. At the age of 12, he and his family moved to Boston, where he attended regular school. He had had only three months of private tutoring in English prior to his arrival in Boston and subsequently received only minimal ESL instruction in his school, where he attended regular classes and studied regular school subject matters in English. He spoke Spanish at home and English in school. Over ten months, his knowledge of negation went along a process that involved the restructuring of his representation of negation in English from pre-verbal to post-verbal position (stage 3 in Table 6.2). As we mentioned in Chapter 3 (section 3.4), pre-verbal negation is the first stage
Development of learner language
Jorge’s development of English negation
Stage Time (recording) Attested L2 examples Developmental description
1. Pre-verbal negation with no/not Months 1–2 No saw him Pre-verbal negation; preferred negation functor is non-target-like no
(tapes 1–4) [I didn’t see him]
2. Pre-verbal negation with don’t Month 3 I don’t saw him Pre-verbal negation; use of unanalysed but more target-like negation (tapes 5–6) [I didn’t see him] functor don’t intensifies
3. Post-verbal negation in restricted Month 4 I will don’t see you tomorrow Onset of post-verbal negation; by the beginning of month 4 (tape 7) contexts (COP/AUX + not/don’t ) (tapes 7–8) [I will not see you tomorrow] no declines; don’t begins to be applied post-verbally but only in
copula/auxiliary contexts
4. Post-verbal negation in all contexts Months 5–6 I didn’t went to Costa Rica Evidence of incipient analysis of don’t, which consolidates over time;
(tapes 9–12) [I didn’t go to Costa Rica] consolidation of target-like negation with copula/auxiliary; by month 6
Not at the ranch (tape 12), no completely disappears and negation of phrases is done with
target-like functor not
Months 7–10 They didn’t see nobody Post-verbal negation is complete; analysis of don’t into carrier of tense
(tapes 13–20) [They didn’t see anybody] and negation is complete; however, instances of unanalysed don’t still co-
exist with analysed don’t/didn’t in production
Interlanguage before grammaticalization 121
regardless of the learners’ L1 background, although speakers of L1s where pre- verbal negation is the grammatical norm may remain in the first stage in English longer than speakers whose L1s require post-verbal negation. (Incidentally, Jorge’s L1 is a pre-verbal negation language, but it only took him three or four months to restructure into post-verbal negation in L2 English.) Hyltenstam (1987) suggests that the first pre-verbal stage may be motivated by some typological basic influence, since across languages of the world pre-verbal negation is a more common grammar configuration than post-verbal negation.
Jorge’s traversing of the four stages was unevenly paced. The early stages were brief and lasted only one or two months each, whereas the rest of the development was much slower and lasted six months. Restructuring into post-verbal negation (at stage 3) was also gradual, first applied to restricted contexts only (after copula and auxiliary verbs) and only later (at stage 4, in month five or six) to the remaining relevant contexts. This kind of gradual application of a rule that spreads from a subset of simpler contexts to increasingly more relevant and complex contexts is often seen in interlanguage development (e.g. in the development of tense and aspect; see section 6.10 and Table 6.6).
Moreover, Jorge’s development of negation did not proceed linearly from error- full to error-less solutions. Instead, and as shown in Table 6.2, only the final fourth stage is target-like. Nevertheless, each new stage reflects a more advanced solution to the developmental problem of negation. Thus, I didn’t went to Costa Rica is a better, more advanced ‘error’ than I will don’t see you tomorrow, which in turn is a better and more advanced non-target-like interlanguage innovation than I don’t
saw you. We must note here, then, that not all ‘errors’ are equal, and that
interlanguage solutions which may look like ‘errors’ can nevertheless be good news. Finally, it is worth pointing out that Jorge’s development also involved overgeneralization (see section 6.5) of a given form as the preferred negation functor. Initially, this was no but it soon became don’t (at stage 2, three months into the study). Towards the middle of the study, his knowledge representation of don’t also underwent analysis from a memorized formula to a construction that carries not only negation but also tense (as evinced in Jorge’s attested utterance I didn’t
went to Costa Rica) and person (i.e. doesn’t).
Jorge was lucky enough to reach the last stage of negation after ten months of immersion in the L2 environment. However, neither eventual attainment of the highest stage in a given developmental sequence nor convergence with the target grammar or even ultimate high levels of accurate use is a necessary outcome of L2 development. This is particularly true of naturalistic adult learners, as we will see in the next section.