Abstract
In recent acquisition research, the position of the verb relative to the negation particle has been used to argue for the early existence of verb movement in children’s grammars of French, German, and other languages. The argument is based on the well-established distribution of finite and nonfinite verbs with respect to the negative particle in child French and child German. Pierce (1989, 1992) demonstrated that French children place the nonfinite verb after the negative particle pas,but place finite verbs before this particle at a surprisingly early age and almost without errors:
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Hamann, C. (2000). Negation, Infinitives, and Heads. In: Powers, S.M., Hamann, C. (eds) The Acquisition of Scrambling and Cliticization. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3232-1_16
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