The Acquisition of Negative Concord: An Experimental Study of L1 Polish learners of L2 Italian and L2 English

The main aim of this thesis revolves around Negative Concord and its expression cross-linguistically. Specifically, this work aims to gain a deeper insight into how Polish L1 speakers may be influenced in their acceptability judgments and intuitions when facing similar and/or opposite NC structures displayed in other languages (targeting English and Italian). The first part of the thesis outlines the theoretical background employed as a starting point. The concept of negation is examined as well as its cross-linguistic peculiarities. After that, the discussion focuses on the different types and structures of negation. Then, the structures employed in Polish, Italian and English are observed, representing respectively: a Strict NC language, Non-Strict NC language and lastly a non-NC language. The second part of the thesis revolves around the empirical study. The research hypotheses are illustrated, along with the participants samples, materials employed and procedure. The experiment involved an acceptability judgement task which was provided in two parallel questionnaires (English and Italian). Finally, the last sections present the results obtained and their analysis through several statistical tests, along with a concluding discussion. The data collected concerning the English L2 speakers’ group did not report a significant distinction in the response patters of L2 and MT speakers. Conversely, the Italian L2 speakers’ group, showed some very interesting outcomes, which, however, did not appear to support our hypotheses. In conclusion, we can infer that the results obtained offer an interesting starting point, from which we can speculate that this outcome might have been a result of multiple potential reasons. Nonetheless, the limited sample size as well as the sometimes-contradictory data gathered, do not allow us to confidently make a final claim in this direction.