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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 710

Part of Session 148: Child Language Variation (Other abstracts in this session)

‘I ø na like the fairies… I like the snails’ Negation and community grammars in the speech of children and caregivers in a Scottish dialect

Authors: Smith, Jennifer (1); Durham, Mercedes (2); Rogers, Derek (1)
Submitted by: Smith, Jennifer (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)

Research over the past two decades in sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that complex patterns of variation evident in adult speech are acquired by children from the very earliest stages of language development (e.g. Chevrot et al 2000, Foulkes et al 2005, Roberts 1997, Smith et al 2007, 2009, in press). More recent attention has turned to how competing theories on acquisition best deal with such variation (e.g. Adger & Smith 2010). In this paper, we combine variationist analysis with more theoretical concerns in the analysis of negation in 29 preschool children (2;10-4;2) in interaction with their primary caregivers in a small community in north east Scotland. Specifically we target do absence in present negative declaratives in (1):

1. I ø na want my chicken dipper….I do na want it on my hand. (Ellie 3;2)

     I don’t want my chicken dipper…I don’t want it on my hand.

On the surface, this looks like a form arising from the developmental stages in the acquisition of negation (e.g. Bloom 1991). However, Smith (2001) shows that do absence is frequent in the adult community grammar, with highly complex constraints on use: 1) grammatical subject plays a major role in governing the variability, where do is variable in all subject types except 3^rd person singular contexts; 2) the fully variable contexts show an effect of subject type, lexical verb and following complement: do absence is favoured with 1^st person, the verb ken and sentential complements.  Analysis of over 1000 contexts in the caregiver data reveal the same rates and linguistic conditioning on use, despite this being a highly circumscribed, non-standard form. More crucially, these constraints – both categorical and variable - are mirrored in the child data. 

We appeal to both universal grammar and more usage-based accounts to interpret these results. Do is categorical in contexts where an overt inflection is required and these data suggest that this parameter is set from the earliest stages of language acquisition (e.g. Snyder 2007). More usage-based models are called upon to explain the variable patterns, where frequency plays a part in the choice between do and no do (e.g. Tomasello 2003). We discuss the ramifications of these findings for theories of language acquisition in the context of variable community grammars. 

Selected references

Adger, D, Smith, J. 2010. Variation in agreement: A lexical feature-based approach. Lingua 120 (5) 1109-1134.

Smith, J. 2000. You ø na hear o’ that kind o’ things: Negative do in Buckie Scots. English-World-Wide, 21(2): 231-259. 

Smith, J, Durham, M & Fortune, L. 2007. Community, caregiver and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Language Variation and Change 19(1):63-99.

Smith, J, Durham, M & Fortune, L. 2009. Universal, dialect-specific pathways of acquisition: Caregivers, children and t/d deletion. Language Variation and Change 21(1): 69-95.

Smith, J, Durham, M & Richards, H. (in press). The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms: children, caregivers and variation. Linguistics.