Cover not available
Article published In:
Child Language Variation: Sociolinguistic and formal approaches
Edited by Véronique Lacoste and Lisa Green
[Linguistic Variation 16:1] 2016
► pp. 131–150

Acquiring language from variable input

Subject-verb agreement and negative concord in Belfast English

Thisi paper considers the impact of morphosyntactic variation in the input on the language acquisition process. In particular, it studies the acquisition of variable subject-verb agreement and variable negative concord by children acquiring the Belfast dialect of English. It finds that, given variation in the input, children can acquire more than one grammatical variant, although both do not necessarily emerge at the same time in the case of negative concord, forms without negative concord emerge in the children’s language before the use of negative concord is used. It is also found that the proportion of each variant in a child’s output matches the proportion in the input they receive.

Keywords: Belfast English, acquisition of variation, negative concord, subject-verb agreement, Negation
Published online: 13 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16.1.06hen
References
Anderwald, Lieselotte
2002 Negation in non-standard British English: gaps, regularizations and asymmetries. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bellugi, Ursula
1967 The acquisition of the system of negation in children’s speech. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University dissertation.Google Scholar
Brown, Roger
1973 A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chevrot, Jean-Pierre, Laurence Beaud & Renata Varga
2000 Developmental data on a French sociolinguistic variable: post-consonantal word-final /R/. Language Variation and Change 121. 295–319. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Eve
1990 The principle of Contrast: A constraint on language acquisition. In Brian Macwhinney (ed.) 2000 Mechanisms of language acquisition, 1–29. London: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Embick, David
2007 Variation and Morphosyntactic Theory: competition fractionated. Language and Linguistics Compass 21. 59–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, Gerard J. Docherty & Dominic Watt
2005 Phonological variation in child-directed speech Language 811. 77–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Henry, Alison
1995 Belfast English and Standard English: dialect variation and parameter setting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Henry, Alison, R. Maclaren, J. Wilson & C. Finlay
1997 The acquisition of negative concord in non-standard English. In E. Hughes, M. Hughes & A. Greenhill (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 269–280. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Kovac, Ceil, & Hugh Douglas Adamson
1981 Variation theory and first language acquisition. In David Sankoff & Henrietta Cedergren (eds.), Variation omnibus, 403–410. Edmonton, Alberta: Linguistic Research, inc.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony
1989 Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 11. 199–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1970 The logic of non-standard English. In Frederick Williams (ed.), Language and poverty: perspectives on a theme, 153–189. Chicago: Markham. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1972 Language in the inner city. Philadephia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
1989 The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 11. 85–97. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian
2000 The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Miller, Karen
2013 Variable input: What Sarah reveals about non-agreeing don’t and theories of root infinitives. Language Acquisition 201. 395–324. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Patterson, Janet L
1992 The development of sociolinguistic phonological variation patterns for (ing) in young children. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico dissertation.Google Scholar
Renn, Jennifer & J. Michael Terry
2009 Operationalizing style: quantifying style shift in the speech of African American adolescents. American Speech 841. 367–390. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Julie
1994 Acquisition of variable rules: (-t,d) deletion and (ing) production in preschool children. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
Romaine, Suzanne
1984 The language of children and adolescents. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham & Liane Fortune
2007 Community, caregiver and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect’. Language Variation and Change 191. 63–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham & Hazel Richards
2013 The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms: caregivers, children, and variation. Linguistics 511. 285–324. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thornton, Rosalind & Graciela Tesan
2013 Sentential negation is early child English. Journal of Linguistics 491. 367–411. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tortora, Christina & Marcel den Dikken
2010 Subject agreement variation: support for the configurational approach. Lingua 1201. 1089–1108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yang, Charles D
2002 Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2006 The Infinite Gift. New York: Scribner.Google Scholar
Zeijlstra, Hedde
2004 Sentential Negation and negative concord. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam dissertation.Google Scholar
2007 Doubling: the semantic driving force behind functional categories. In B. ten Cate & H. Zeevat (eds.), Logic, Language and Computation, 260–280. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 On the syntactic flexibility of formal features. In T. Biberauer (ed.), The limits of syntactic variation, 143–174. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 8 other publications

Blanchette, Frances & Marianna Nadeu
2018. Prosody and the meanings of English negative indefinites. Journal of Pragmatics 129 ► pp. 123 ff. DOI logo
Jackson, Samantha
2023. Acquisition during normative code-mixing: Trinidadian children’s varilingual pronoun usage. First Language 43:3 ► pp. 283 ff. DOI logo
Jakubów, Ana Paula da Silva Passos
2023. O contato linguístico e a aquisição da linguagem: considerações sobre a produção variável da concordância de número no português brasileiro,. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada 39:2 DOI logo
Jakubów, Ana Paula S.P. & Letícia M. Sicuro Corrêa
2021. Chapter 5. The production of variable number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese. In L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 65], ► pp. 110 ff. DOI logo
Lukyanenko, Cynthia & Karen Miller
2023. Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English. Language Variation and Change 35:1 ► pp. 29 ff. DOI logo
Shin, Naomi & Karen Lynn Miller
2024. Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation: A Reply to Commentaries. Language Learning and Development 20:1 ► pp. 83 ff. DOI logo
Smith, Jennifer
2021. Chapter 1. Child language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation. In Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Acquisition across the Lifespan [Studies in Language Variation, 26], ► pp. 12 ff. DOI logo
Smith, Jennifer & Mercedes Durham
2019. Sociolinguistic Variation in Children's Language, DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.