The meaning of negation in the second language classroom: Evidence from ‘any’

Abstract

eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version -refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher's website. TakedownIf you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. 1The meaning of negation in the second language classroom: evidence from any Abstract This paper brings together an experimental study involving L2 knowledge of negation in English and an analysis of how English language textbooks treat negation, in order to consider whether textbook explanations of negation could better exploit linguistic insights into negation. We focus on the English negative polarity item any, whose distribution is contingent on negation, whether through the explicit negator not or through lexical semantic negators (e.g., hardly). Our experiment compares Chinesespeaking learners with existing data from Arabic-speaking learners, finding lower accuracy on any with lexical semantic negators in both groups. Our textbook analysis reveals an approach to negation that is limited to form, focusing on the explicit negator not without explicit treatment of other types of negation. We propose that emphasising the meaning of negation, with explicit treatment of the full range of negative forms could facilitate more complete acquisition across a range of grammatical properties where negation plays a role.2

Grammatical meaning and the second language classroom: Introduction

“…The article by Gil et al (2017) brings up the issue of negation and how it is taught. In natural languages, there are some special words such as English any that have to appear embedded under negation in order to be acceptable.…”

“…The papers in this volume can be divided into two sets: those that report on a teaching intervention study that aims to incorporate linguistic description from generative linguistic research into grammar instruction (Hirakawa et al, 2018;Lopez, 2017;Umeda et al, 2017) and those that combine experimental L2 acquisition work with pedagogically oriented research, including a survey of the presentation of linguistic properties in textbooks (Gil et al, 2017), a survey of language teacher views and investigation of classroom input (Leal & Slabakova, 2017), and exploration of materials development (Shimanskaya & Slabakova, 2017).…”

“…The properties under investigation in the different papers all relate to elements of language that typically receive at least some attention in the language classroom: articles (Lopez, 2017;Umeda, Snape, Wiltshier & Yusa, 2017), adjectives (Hirakawa, Shibuya & Endo, 2018), and negation (Gil, Marsden & Whong, 2017) in English, and clitic pronouns in Spanish (Leal & Slabakova, 2017) and French (Shimanskaya & Slabakova, 2017). The formal linguistic properties of these elements have all been investigated within the generative linguistic paradigm.…”

Polarity-item anything in L3 English: Where does transfer come from when the L1 is Catalan and the L2 is Spanish?

“…As already noted, textbook instruction on any typically points out that any should be used in questions and negated sentences. A comprehensive review of English language instruction materials (including some used in the language schools where our L3 participants were tested) by Gil et al (2017) . 18 The L3 groupsÕ acceptance rates thus do not appear to come from transfer from their L2 Spanish.…”

“…Despite the morphosyntactic differences between n-words and any , they share a defining grammatical property, namely their sensitivity to negation. This property is highlighted in the instruction on any in English language teaching materials, which, as shown in a textbook survey by Gil et al (2017), typically give a rule along the lines of ‘use any with negation and in questions’. Further, the limited existing research on the L1 acquisition of English any shows, based on corpus investigation, that when children start to use any , the majority of occurrences are in the scope of negation, and, moreover, there are very few instances of any in unlicensed environments (Tieu, 2010).…”