Negation in L2 Acquisition and Beyond

This chapter provides an overview of generative research on the acquisition of negation by multilingual learners. While early research compared the development of negation in adult L2 learners with L1 children to assess L2 learners’ access to Universal Grammar), subsequent studies focused instead on how verbal feature specification influences L2 acquisition of the relative position of negation and verbs. More recently, research on L2 negation has examined what the earliest stages of the acquisition of negation reveal about the relationship between the lexicon and syntax and has compared adult and child L2 acquisition. Other recent studies have examined the acquisition of relative scope and the source of difficulties in the L2 acquisition of negation at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.