An Analysis of Negation in Child Korean: An Alternative to the UCC Account

Abstract

Negation in the Korean language has been paid great attention to in regard to its peculiar syntactic properties. Moreover, child Korean data show an interesting developmental aspect of the negative structures, which is characterized with a certain type of errors involved with a position of the negator an. Recently, child Korean data on negation has been accounted for in a new perspective, with a theoretical proposal on optionality observed in child language. For instances, Baek and Wexler (2002) and Hagstrom (2002) proposed a new analysis of the errors found in the negative construction by young Korean children, based on Wexler’s (1998) Unique Checking Constraint (UCC) which was originally proposed to explain optional infinitives in child language. In this research, we will discuss those studies and explore an alternative account. We will argue that children’s errors in production of negation might be explained with respect to chunking, on the basis of the Korean light verb construction (LVC).