This dissertation is an investigation of early child English negative constructions using 'no'and ;not' in an interpreted Unification Categorial Grammar (UCG)framework. This work is concerned with (1) the developmental relationship between adult and child negative utterances, (2)the optimal characterization of the developmental correspondence between formal grammatical negative structures and their uses, and (3) how the temporal dynamics of this developmental correspondence between form and use be rationally accounted for.
A discourse analysis of child English negation reveals that young children do not typically use 'no' as a suppletive alternant for the sentence negation marker 'not', as typically assumed. Rather, it is argued that children use 'no' correctly as a determiner in (elliptical) negative noun phrases and as an early presentential metalinguistic operator similar to 'no way'. Children use `not' both as a sentence negation marker and as a polycategorial negative operator in colloquial negative expressions like 'not today'.
I present a colloquial negation fragment in which the interpretation of colloquial negation is treated as a function of model structure rather than underlying syntactic structure. This is done by using contextual functions to derive different interpretive functions and making these model structures available as translations of elliptical negatives in discourse. This approach to child language interpretation is natural to UCG where the interesting connections between categorial, semantic, and pragmatic information can be explicitly described for each well-formed expression of a (child) language.
This dissertation also investigates how UCG can be exploited as a theory of language development. The Categorial Complexity Hypothesis (CCH) states that children produce the simpler categories of the target language in their utterances before they produce the more complex ones. When applied to UCG, the hypothesis states that the progressive development in children's negative utterances follows the partial ordering of categories based on the complexity of their descriptions. I discuss two predictions made by the CCH and evaluate them using child English spontaneous speech data from three children.
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