The development of forms of negation in the acquisition of Turkish

Abstract

This study scrutinizes the development of negation in Turkish by analyzing of a monolingual Turkish-speaking child’s speech between 28 to 32 months. The developmental progress of negative forms in parent-child exchanges is explained and presented with examples featuring a girl and her parents. The data has been obtained from the CHILDES database and is divided into three sets based on the age of the child: 2;4, 2;6 and 2;8. First, the paper attempted to outline how negation is formed in Turkish and analyzed the data to find patterns of negation to trace the development of negation in the child’s speech. It aimed to prove how the child gradually expands her ability to use negative forms by using different communicative strategies over a five-month period. To facilitate this expansion, the child uses some strategies such as variety sets, multiple negative forms in collaboration, giving reasons and results in the speech. The child is identified to have acquired the forms of negation and strategies for a successful communication in a clear developmental sequence. The data reveals that the expansion goes from easy to linguistically and cognitively more challenging forms. The child acquires and uses free forms such as yok (not existent) initially, but later she can also produce more complex utterances such as orada hiçkimse yok (There isn’t anyone there). Therefore, this study presents evidence for the existence of developmental expansion of each form to make negation, but there is no evidence of clear-cut stages going successively and following each other in a systematic order. Thus, the analysis proves that negation develops by expanding on the previous knowledge and the forms are used interconnectedly, so they mostly overlap.