On the Scope of Negation : More evidence for early parameter setting

Abstract

"In a seminal study of the acquisition of negation by English-speaking children, Klima and Bellugi (1966) proposed that children go through an initial stage in which sentential negation is ‘external’. According to this proposal, a sentence such as the now famous (1a), no the sun shining, means the sun is not shining, with the negative wrongly located in sentence-initial position"