Acquisition of Negation in Korean : Object Constructions in the Optional Infinitive Stage

Abstract

One of the biggest issues in the study of language acquisition is to explain why children produce non-adult-like utterances, or why certain constructions develop at a certain time despite the existence of "early knowledge." This paper explores and provides supporting evidence to a possible role of "linguistic maturation" as an answer to the question by presenting a case where a certain delay/error in children's language use is due to maturational factors. Particularly, I argue that the wide-spread error in children's production of short-form negation in Korean known as an misplacement results from a single additional constraint on children's grammar, which will cease to function at a later stage in child's maturational development. The present analysis also supports "early knowledge" by demonstrating that a correlation between the an misplacement error and the use of case marking in children's utterances at this stage suggests that children between the age of 2 and 3 already know all the relevant morphological and syntactic aspects of Accusative case assignment in Korean.