Two negations for the price of one

Standard English is typically described as a double negation language. In double negation languages, each negative marker contributes independent semantic force. Two negations in the same clause usually cancel each other out, resulting in an affirmative sentence. Other dialects of English permit negative concord. In negative concord sentences, the two negative markers yield a single semantic negation. This paper explores how English-speaking children interpret sentences with more than one negative element, in order to assess whether their early grammar allows negative concord. According to Zeijlstra’s (2004) typological generalization, if a language has a negative syntactic head, it will be a negative concord language. Since Standard English is often analysed as having a negative head, it represents an apparent exception to Zeijlstra’s generalization. This raises the intriguing possibility that initially, children recognize that English has a negative head (i.e., n’t) and, therefore, assign negative concord interpretations to sentences with two negations, despite the absence of evidence for this interpretation in the adult input. The present study investigated this possibility in a comprehension study with 20 3to 5-year-old children and a control group of 15 adults. The test sentences were presented in contexts that made them amenable to either a double negation or a negative concord interpretation. As expected, the adult participants assigned the double negation interpretation of the test sentences the majority of the time. In contrast, the child participants assigned the alternative, negative concord interpretation the majority of the time. Children must jettison the negative concord interpretation of sentences with two negative markers, and acquire a double negation interpretation. We propose that the requisite positive evidence is the appearance of negative expressions like nothing in object position. Because such expressions exert semantic force without a second negation, this informs children that they are acquiring a double negation language.


Introduction
In double negation languages, each negation marker exerts semantic force (Zeijlstra 2004;de Swart 2010;Moscati 2006;. In certain linguistic environments, the two negation markerscanceleachotherout,resultinginanaffirmativeinterpretation.Double negation languages can be contrasted with negative concord languages. In these languages, sentenceswithtwonegationmarkersmayexpressaninterpretationthatisequivalentto sentences with a single negation. StandardEnglishisclassifiedasadoublenegationlanguage.Theterm'StandardEnglish' isusedheretorefertovarietiesofEnglishthatexcludesentencesthatexpressnegative concord. In double negation languages such as Standard English, double negation is sometimes associated with metalinguistic negation or pragmatic negation. This terminology refers to the function of double negation in conversational contexts, which is to correct a previousutterance(Horn1991;2001;Puskás2012;Blanchette2015) . 1 Puskásillustrates thecorrectivepragmaticfunctionofdoublenegationwiththeexamplein(1).
b. Lenny does not like nothing.
AnexampleofnegativeconcordtakenfromLabov'sseminalstudyisgivenin(2) (Labov 1972: 804). The example is taken from an interview with a 60-year-old speaker from Georgia,referredtoasMrs.Gratton.ThisspeakerusedStandardEnglishandsinglenegation with negative polarity items in the first 20 minutes of the interview but a switch inthetopicofconversationto'bakingwithoutmeasuring'triggeredtheuseofnegative concord.

Negation in the grammar of English
AdultspeakersofStandardEnglishcanreadilyinterpretnegativeconcordsentenceseven iftheythemselvesdonotproducenegativeconcordsentences.Theeaseincomprehensionofthenegativeconcordinterpretationmaybedue,inpart,tothefactthatspeakers ofStandardEnglishhaveabundantexposuretonegativeconcorddialectsinthemedia (e.g., I can't get no satisfaction).Inthepresentpaper,weofferadifferentexplanationfor the observation that adult speakers of Standard English can readily interpret negative concordsentences.ThealternativepossibilityhasbeenraisedpreviouslybyBlanchette (2013)andbyTubau(2008),andentertainedbrieflybyZeijlstra(2004).Theseresearch-ersallproposethatStandardEnglishisinherentlyanegativeconcordlanguage. A question immediately arises. If Standard English is inherently a negative concord language,whydon'tspeakersofStandardEnglishproducenegativeconcordsentences? One possible answer to this question would point to sociolinguistic factors, such as a social stigma, which some people may associate with negative concord sentences (cf. Nevalainen2006;Horn2010).Indeed, Blanchette(2013;2015)proposesthatStandard English is inherently a negative concord language and observes that sociolinguistic factors maycontributetotheabsenceofnegativeconcordsentencesbyspeakersofthisdialect.
Thepresentstudyisanexperimentalinvestigationofnegativeconcordinthegrammars of children acquiring Standard English. We explore the possibility that young children acquiringStandardEnglishassignanegativeconcordinterpretationtosentenceslike(3) duringtheirearlylanguagedevelopment.IfyoungchildrenacquiringStandardEnglish license negative concord interpretations of sentences with two negative markers, then this would lend credence to the conjecture that Standard English is inherently a negative concord language.

Literature review
For children acquiring negative concord dialects of English the triggering evidence informing children that the local language has formal features for negation and the functional projection NegP is simply sentences with negative concord in the positive input(Zeijlstra2004).Thefactthattherearetwonegativemarkersinformschildrenthat that they need to build a NegP functional projection, to license the negative operator that'agrees'withthen-wordsinnegativeconcordsentences(Zeijlstra2004;2008a;b). AcquiringStandardEnglishisnotasclear-cut.Sincenegativeconcordsentencesarenot presentintheprimarylinguisticdata,childrenrequireanalternativesourceofpositive evidenceinordertopostulateaNegPprojectiontohostthecontractedformofnegation, n't.Onepossiblesourceofevidenceisnegativeauxiliaryverbs.Inprinciple,anynegative auxiliary verb could be taken by children as evidence that n't is a head form of negation. As we saw, however, the negative auxiliary verbs don't and can't maybeanalyzedasfixed formsbyyoungEnglish-speakingchildren.Childrenrequireclearevidencethatthecontracted from of negation, n't,isacomponentpartofthenegativeauxiliaryverb.Thornton& Tesan(2007;proposedthatthemulti-morphemicnegativeauxiliaryverbdoesn't providesthemostsalientevidenceinformingchildrenthatn't is a head form of negation, giventhatthe3 rd personagreementmarkerisinternaltotheword. Despitethefactthatthenegativeauxiliaryverbdoesn't is likely to be abundant in the inputtoEnglish-speakingchildren,theempiricalfindingsfromtheThorntonandTesan (2007;2013)studiesrevealedthatchildrenoftentakeconsiderabletimebeforetheyproduce doesn't.Supposingthattheproductiveuseofdoesn't is indicative of the head form ofnegationinchildren'sgrammars,thefindingsfromthesestudiessuggestthattheNegP projectionisintroducedintosomechildren'sgrammarswhentheyareasyoungas2;6, andotherswhentheyareasoldas3;6.Mostimportantly,theThorntonandTesanstudies documentedadramaticchangeinchildren'sgrammarscloselyfollowingontheheelsof theproductiveuseofthenegativeauxiliaryverbdoesn't.Soonafterchildrenbeganproducing doesn't, they abandoned the use of not in negative sentences. 5 Children'snon-adult negativesentenceswererapidlyreplacedbysentenceswiththesamecolloquialnegative auxiliary verbs used by adults.
ThenotesthataccompanytheAdamcorpusstatethatAdam'sparentsspokeStandard English. Sarah came from a working class family and Bellugi observed that Sarah produced some nonstandard lexical items. However, Bellugi does not state whether or notSarah'sparentswerespeakersofanegativeconcordlanguage.Thispossibilitywas assessed by Miller (2012) who documented the existence of negative concord sentences in the transcripts of the speech by Sarah's parents, although Sarah produced far more sentenceswithnegativeconcordthanherparentsdid.WewillthereforeconsiderSarah tobeacquiringanegativeconcorddialectofEnglish,andAdamtobeacquiringadouble negation dialect.ExamplesofnegativeconcordstructuresproducedbySaraharegiven in(6),and examplesfromAdamappearin (7).
In summary, children's correct responses to the control sentences indicate, first, that theyareabletoprocesssentenceswithtwonegationsand,second,thattheydonotanalyze words like nothingasexistentialexpressions(something, anything). If we assume that children initially have a negative concord grammar, then the fact that words like nothing exertindependentsemanticforceinthecontrolsentencesprovideschildrenwithevidence (what are called detectable errors in the learnability literature) that they must jettison theirinitialnegativeconcordgrammarinfavorofadoublenegationgrammar.Further evidence is provided by filler items that were included in the experiment. There were 3 simple sentence fillers like (10) included in the test battery for the participants; the other3fillerscontainedsomething.

Participants
Twenty-four English-speaking children participated in the experiment. The children ranged in age from 3;6-5;8 with a mean age of 4;7. The children were recruited from threechildcarecenterssituatedeitherontheuniversitycampusorcloseby,andallofthe childrenweremonolingualspeakersofAustralianEnglish.AustralianEnglishconforms to other global versions of Standard English in disallowing negative concord (Newbrook 2001).Wehadnoreasontobelievethatanyofthechildparticipantswereexposedto negative concord in the home. The adult controls who participated in the study were 15undergraduatestudentsatthesameuniversity.Theadultparticipantsallcompleteda languagebackgroundquestionnaire,andonlythoseadultparticipantswhoweremonolingual speakers of Australian English from birth were included in the study. All of the adult controlparticipantsweretakingafirst-yearlinguisticscourse,andreceivedcoursecredit fortheirparticipation. 9

Materials
Theexperimentaltaskconsistedof6stories,eachbuiltaroundathemesuchasanimal preschool, the princesses' partyandso on.Each story was followed by 3 items for the child to judge; a target sentence like (8), a control sentence like (9) and a filler item like (10). The stories devised for the test sentences were divided into 2 conditions. In one condition, the test sentence at the end of the story was true on a double negation interpretation, but false on a negative concord interpretation. This condition is called Condition 1. In the other condition, the test sentence was true on a negative concord reading,butfalseonadoublenegationinterpretation.ThisiscalledCondition2.There were3testtrialsineachcondition.
First, we will illustrate the experimental materials using an example story from each condition.Below,wegivetheplotline.Thedetailedscriptsforthestoriesareprovidedin AppendixB.
ThesituationattheendofthisstoryisillustratedinFigure1below. Afterthisstorythepuppetwasaskedanexplicityes/no-question,towhichhereplied usingoneofourtestsentences,asin(11).Thissatisfiedthepresuppositionfordouble negation, that is, that there was someone who may have bought nothing and that this is being challenged.
In Condition 1 stories, the puppet's statement was true on a double negation reading; it was true that the girl who skipped had bought something. In addition, the sentence wasfalseonanegativeconcordreading;itwasfalsethatthegirlwhoskippedbought nothing.Sincethedoublenegationreadingwasthe"Yes"answer,itwasassumedthat children would access this reading if it was available, in accord with the Principle of Charity. The Principle of Charity is a pragmatic principle according to which hearers assume that speakers' statements are true, unless there is evidence to the contrary (Davidson1984).  (12) Experimenter: Inthatstory,didthemousewhodressedupcooknothing?

Control Sentences and Filler Sentences
Thecontrolsentencesweredesignedtoensurethatthetestsentenceswerenottoocomplex forthechildparticipantstoprocess,invirtueofhavingtwoinstancesofnegation.Ifthe test sentences exceeded children's computational resources, then it was likely that the control sentences would also. In this case, children might just ignore one of the negations. Finally, each test story also incorporated a filler item. This was done to provide an equalnumberofYesandNoresponses,andtoensurethatchildrenwerepresentedwith some easy judgments, in addition to the learnability consideration we discussed earlier, in Section2.Thefillerswereeitherpositivestatements(3fillers),orstatementswithasingle negation(3fillers).Example(14)illustratesafilleritemwithasinglenegation,fromthe skippingstoryinCondition1.
Because the boy in the skipping story did buy some flowers, this filler question was clearly false.
In (17),weprovidearepresentativesampleofchildren'sreasonsforrejectingthetest sentences in Condition 2, using the 'dress up' story that was associated with the test sentence The mouse who dressed up didn't cook nothing. The different patterns of responses by the child and adult groups are summarized in Figure 4. As the figure clearly indicates, Wepartitionedchildandadultparticipantsintogroupsaccordingtotheirpreference for one interpretation over the other. A participant was judged to have a preference foroneofthetwokindsofinterpretationsiftheirresponseswereconsistentwiththat interpretation on at least 5 out of the 6 test trials. Using this criterion, 15 children exhibited a preference for the negative concord interpretation, 3 preferred the doublenegationinterpretation,and2childrenhadnopreference.Incontrasttothechild group,thesamecriterionresultedin13adultsbeingclassifiedashavingapreference forthedoublenegationinterpretation,and2exhibitedapreferenceforthenegative concordinterpretation.
Finally, we report the pattern of responses by children and adults to the filler items. We proposed that filler items with the negative quantifier nothing provide critical evi-dencetochildrenthatStandardEnglishisadoublenegationlanguage,keepinginmind our assumption for the purposes of the experiment that children's grammars generate only negative concord interpretations at this point in their development. Nevertheless, weexpectedchildrentoproduceadult-likeresponsestotheseitems.Asweanticipated,

Discussion
SeveraltheoreticallinguistshaveraisedthepossibilitythatStandardEnglishisunderlyinglyanegativeconcordlanguage(Zeijlstra2004;Tubau2008;Blanchette2013;2015), although theories differ in their views of why negative concord is not represented in adults'productions.Inearlierwork,Thornton&Tesan (2013) From a processing complexity perspective, it is generally assumed that is easier to accessaninterpretationofanambiguoussentencethatmakesthesentencetruerather thanone thatmakes itfalse.Thisis thefoundationalassumptionofwhatis calledthe PrincipleofCharity(Davidson1984).ThePrincipleofCharityexplainswhypeopleexhibit a"Yes"biasinmanypsychologicaltasks.Whenconfrontedwithanambiguoussentence, for example, hearers make an effort to come up with an interpretation that makes the sentencecomportwithreality,wheneverpossible.Children'srejectionsofthepuppet's statementsinCondition2constituteapparentviolationsofthePrincipleofCharity.Ithas beenarguedthatviolationsofthePrincipleofCharityareevidencethat,asamatterof 15 A reviewer notes that adult participants' preference for the double negation interpretation may have been elevated by the fact that adults who are tested in academic settings are conscious of the social stigmaassociatedwithnegativeconcordinterpretations.
fact,theparticipantsdidnotfindthesentencesambiguous,butwereonlyabletogenerate an interpretation that made the puppet's statement false (Crain & Thornton 1998 Before we lay out these scenarios, it is worth noting that there is no issue of learnability for children who are acquiring negative concord dialects of English. These childrenwillbeexposedtopositiveevidenceforbothdoublenegationandnegative concord interpretations(cf.Zeijlstra2007).Consideroneofthetestsentencesfromthepresent experiment,The girl who skipped didn't buy nothing, heard in a context in which the girl bought nothing. Children acquiring negative concord dialects of English could use this sentence as evidence that the local language generates a negative concord structure. In the structure, the n-word nothingisassignedthesamemeaningasthecorresponding negative polarityitemanything, i.e., The girl who skipped didn't buy anything.Thesechildrenwould alsobeexposedtopositiveevidencethatthesamesentenceexpressesadoublenegation interpretationincontextsthatarefelicitousforthisinterpretation.

Converging on the adult grammar
We have couched our experimental findings from the present study using the same theoretical backdrop as we used in previous research, i.e., we have adopted Zeijlstra's negative concord parameter (Zeijlstra 2004). Following Thornton and Tesan (2013), we have supposed that English-speaking children initially adopt the default parameter valueofthenegativeconcordparameter,accordingtowhichnegationisanadverb.We alsofollowedThorntonandTesan(2013)insupposingthatchildrenhaveacquiredthe head form of negation, n't,andthefunctionalprojectiontohostit,NegP, once they begin producing sentences with the negative auxiliary verb doesn't. Since children generally haveacquiredtheheadformofnegationbyaround3yearsofage,weassumedthatthe childparticipantsintheexperimentweconductedmighthypothesizethatEnglishpermits negative concord.
At this point, at least two possible acquisition scenarios can be advanced within the parameter-setting framework to explain children's transition to the adult grammar. As suggested in Section 2, one scenario sees children as switching from the default (double negation) setting of the negative concord parameter to the value that generates negativeconcordsentences.Atthatpoint,childrenwouldbeabletoassignnegativeconcord interpretationstosentencessuchastheoneswepresentedintheexperimentbutwould nothaveaccesstodoublenegationinterpretations.Therefore,theexperimentalhypothesis was that children and adults would assign different syntactic analyses to the test sentences.
To converge on the double negation grammar of adult speakers of Standard English, childrenwouldneedtoresetthenegativeconcordparameterbacktothedefaultvalue. 16 There is abundant evidence informing children that Standard English does not permit negativeconcord.Theevidenceconsistsofsentenceswithn-words like nothing in object position.Aswehaveseen,negativeconcordlanguages(e.g.,Italian)donottoleratenegativequantifiersinobjectposition,sosuchsentenceswouldrepresentadetectableerror, revealing that their current negative concord grammar is not the same as that of adult speakersofthelocallanguage.Thiswouldtriggeraresettingoftheparameter.
As noted, the experiment contained both control items and fillers with the negative quantifiernothing inobjectposition(i.e.The girl who didn't skip bought nothing and The boy bought nothing).Childrenandadultsbothrespondedtotheseitemsinthesameway, treating nothingasanegativequantifier.Thechildparticipantsdidnotappeartobeatall puzzledbythecontrolandfilleritems,however,asmightbeexpectedifchildrenhada purelynegativeconcordgrammar.
Atsomepoint,childrenacquiringStandardEnglishwouldstillneedtoeliminatenegativeconcordfromtheirgrammars.Thiswouldbenomeanfeat,becausechildrenwould begeneratingasupersetoftheinterpretationspermittedbyadultspeakers.Intheabsence ofdirectpositiveevidencetopurgetheirgrammarsofnegativeconcordinterpretations, thisacquisitionscenariowouldrequirethepostulationofsomeformofindirectnegative evidence. In order to purge the negative concord interpretation from their grammars, children would have to notice that the adults in their environment always assign double negationinterpretationsandnevernegativeconcordinterpretations.