Negative Concord vs. Negative Polarity and the Acquisition of Japanese

The goal of this paper is to argue that negative concord is the “default value” for the two types of neg-sensitivity by investigating how Japanese children acquire NCIs in their language. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we review several syntactic differences between NPIs and NCIs and a morphosyntactic analysis of those items proposed by Kuno (2007). It is pointed out that the question of how Japanese NCIs are acquired arises from Kuno’s analysis. In section 3, based on the analysis of CHILDES, we show that Japanese children do not hear decisive input to distinguish NCIs from NPIs. In section 4, we experimentally show that young children (around 4-years-old) have already acquired the knowledge of an NCI. Finally, in section 5, we conclude that children at first assume negation-sensitive items (i.e., NPIs or NCIs) to be NCIs by default.