Verbal negation in the interlanguage of Arabic-speaking women acquiring English as a second language

Abstract

The present investigation is an empirical study in second language acquisition. It offers a careful examination of certain syntactic structures as produced by adult learners of English as a second language in an untutored, natural linguistic environment. The area which is under investigation is the negation of the verbal phrase within the sentence (intrasentential verbal negation). The corpus consists of language material which was recorded at a number of consecutive meetings with five women whose first language was Arabic. The study offers a description of the methodology followed in collecting the material, as well as the problems encountered during this process.All the utterances comprising intrasentential verbal negation have been extracted from the corpus for a detailed analysis. They are classified on the basis of the types of verb negation structures attested in the data. The analysis of each class of data incorporates several aspects. It comprises the incidence of each class in the corpus; the developmental significance of a category in the acquisition process; the development of a class in the second language production of an individual learner over a period of time; a comparison of negative and affirmative utterances with identical verb structures, where relevant; variation in the use of particular verb negation classes within the population; and the degree of variability in the expression of negatives. Where appropriate, the data are compared with findings from previous studies in first language and second language acquisition in order to highlight similarities and differences. Factors that are assumed to influence the acquisition process, namely specific learner types and socio-psychological variables, are related to the data.