The Negation Gap in ESL

Abstract

The present study examines how Korean-speaking learners of English as a second language understand English 'bi-negative' sentences, which contain both not and a negative pronoun (e.g., No one didn't cry, I didn't do nothing). A semantic similarity judgment task demonstrates that native speakers of English clearly accept patterns of this type and assign them an affirmative interpretation. However, the same task reveals that our 31 Korean participants are largely unaware of this usage and reject the affirmative meaning of the bi-negative sentences. A translation experiment involving a different group of 32 Korean-speaking learners reveals a strong tendency to interpret the bi-negative patterns as if they were the sort of negative concord pattern typical of Korean. These results suggest the presence of first-language transfer, even among advanced speakers.