Negation and relational predicates in French and English as L2s

This paper investigates the acquisition of negative particles together with the development of verbal morphology, in the interlanguages of two Spanish speakers learning French and two Italian speakers learning English. All informants come from the Project European second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants, fincanced by the European Science Foundation Project (cf. Perdue, 1993). We will present, on the one hand, the stages leading adult second language learners to mark on the verb the relational information which contribute to the notion of “finiteness” (tense and aspect references; subject/verb agreement), on the other hand, the development in the expression of negative functions. Our final purpose is to show the interaction between the emergence of relational (or non-thematic) predicates (namely, copula, have/avoir as possession predicates, avoir/être and be/have as temporal auxiliaries, and modals) and the mastering of postverbal and postauxiliary negation. So, we shall exclusively concentrate on sentence negation, namely on the French structure (ne +) Cop/Vlexical/Mod/Aux + pas and the English more diversified constructions Cop/Mod/Aux + not and do/does/did/will... + not. C. Perdue, 1993, Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.