5.

4 Later Speech Stages:Rule Formation for

Negatives, Questions, Passives & Other
Complex Structures
5.4.1 Later Speech Stages: Rule Formation for Negatives, Questions, Passives and Other
Complex Structures
Features of Negation
-There are 5 different things in producing the negative formation.
-1) Where to insert the negative marker. 2) When and where to insert auxiliary do. 3) When
auxiliary do is used, the tense from the verb is shifted to the auxiliary do.4) Lexical
Concordances must be made in the case of the negative. 5) Optionally, AUX + NEG (did + not)
can be contracted to didnt.
-A research has done under negation formation. The research involved 3 children and as the
results it revealed 3 types of period.
-Period 1-No Money. This is the earliest period. The form of no or not placed at the front of
an affirmative utterance.
-Period 2-I dont want it. The negative marker tends to appear internally within the utterance
rather than outside it as in the previous period, and the auxiliary do appear with the negation
marker. Some researchers believe that children treat dont and cant as single words and do not
analyze them as Aux + Neg.
-Period 3-Paul cant have one. The period before the perfect negatives are formed. The copula
be and the modal will appear with negation and imperative negation. The child has a good
idea of when do must be inserted and when is not.
Question formations
-Question forms also demonstrate a complex abstract task which young children can solve.
-Two basic forms: 1) Yes-No Questions-solicit a yes or no answer 2) WH Questions-that uses
who, what and etc.
v Yes No Questions
-Involves same basic syntactic consideration as in the formation of negatives.
-Sentences which have copula be, modal, AUX have that item in front of the sentence in a
question. E.g: Is John a very tall boy?
v WH Questions
-PRO (reduced substitute) forms are formed by substituting the phrase which is targeted for
questioning with an appropriate WH word.
-WH word is always placed at the beginning of the sentence.
Passive formations

-Children begin to use more complex forms such as the passive much later in their language
development.
-It occurs so rarely in childrens spontaneous speech
-E.g: The boy pushed the truck The truck was pushed by the boy.
-The full passive can be produced where certain other subject NPs do not appear. E.g: The door
was opened.
-Childrens comprehension of the passive form does not begin until they are around 4 years old.
-Sometimes the passive form is semantically reversible.
-Around the age of 5, certain verbs used with the passive still cause some comprehension
problems for children.
-Only by the age of 13, the children correctly produce agent-final full passive with by and
instrumental passives using with.
Other problems
v Structure with 2 or more verbs
-The acquisition of complex sentences, utterances containing 2 or more verbs.
-All of these complex forms consist of clauses that are attached to the end of the utterances.
-WH-clauses appear with abstract adverbials. E.g: Can I do it when we get home?
-It is interesting that the adverbs when, where emerge before the nouns that they replace.
v Verb problems
-Carol Chomsky found that some complex grammatical structures may not be acquired until
quite late, even at the age of 10 or 11 years.
-Children sometimes apply it incorrectly depending on the verb in the main clause.