Syntactic Possibilities in Selected Children and Adults’ Choices of Negative Constructions in English Language Usage
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Date
2020
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Lingusitics Assocation, Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
Abstract
The Principles and Parameters theory of syntax as propounded by Chomsky (1981. 1995) postulates that, because children possess human genome, they are biologically en suite with a Universal Grammar that contains the core principles of language. Thus, this study employed Prince and Smolensky's (1993) Optimality Theory of syntax to investigate the syntactic possibilities in selected children and adults’ choices of negative constructions in English language usage. To achieve this aim. the study investigated if all optimality mechanisms (grammatical, morphological, lexical and analytical processes) for generating negative constructions were attestable in the constructions of the respondents; and isolated the optimality devices exploited mainly by the adults in order to discover the linguistic resources that are commonly used by both the children and the adults. The data used for the study was sourced from the set of tests designed to elicit negative responses from 20 respondents, who evenly consisted of 10 children and 10 adults. The results showed that the respondents exploited the grammatical, morphological, lexical and analytical processes as optimal outputs to produce negative constructions. The analysis also demonstrated that, while the adult respondents uniquely employed the analytical process, the children respondents exploited the grammatical process more than the adults. On the basis of these findings, the study concludes that, children's syntactic devices of generating negative utterances differ significantly from those used by adults.
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Keywords
Optimality Theory, Negative Propositions, Analytical Processes, Negative Constructions