The acquisition of negation is perhaps the best-studied syntactic phenomenon in early
interlanguage research,and many of these publications concluded that first (L1) and
second language (L2) development had much more in common than had previously been
assumed. In the present paper, the problem of whether the same underlying principles
and mechanisms guide L1 and L2 acquisition will be re-examined from the perspective
of more recent grammatical theory. The empirical basis consists of longitudinal
case-studies of the acquisition of French and German as first and second languages.
The L2 learners' first language is Spanish.
In L1 data one finds a rapid, uniform and almost error-free course of development
across languages exhibiting quite different morphosyntactic means of expressing
negation. This is explained in terms of Parameter Theory, primarily referring to
functional categories determining the placement of finite verbal elements. L2
acquisition, on the other hand, is characterized by considerable variability, not
only crosslinguistically, but also across learners and even within individuals. This
can be accounted for by assuming different strategies of language use. More
importantly, different kinds of linguistic knowledge are drawn upon in L1 as opposed
to L2. It is claimed that adult L2 learners, rather than using structure-dependent
operations constrained by Universal Grammar (UG), rely primarily on linear
sequencing strategies which apply to surface strings.
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