This thesis discusses diachronic developments in the expression of negation in Arabic and other Afro-Asiatic languages, focussing in particular on the set of changes known as ‘Jespersen’s Cycle’ – prototypically the progression from preverbal to bipartite to postverbal negation – as well as the development of indefinites in the scope of negation. However, learners build their syntactic representation gradually and transfer their L1 knowledge at each stage before re-setting the parameter to the French values. This book concludes that parameter re-setting is possible for instructed English speaking learners of French. The results show significant levels of L1 transfer in the Initial State and gradual development of sentence structure. ![]() ![]() Oral production, comprehension and judgement data from five groups of 15 instructed English speaking learners of French ranging from beginners aged 12-13 to the high-advanced group aged 21-23 are presented. These structures are examined to determine potential parameter re-setting and empirically test three Initial State theories (Organic Grammar, Full Transfer/Full Access and Modulated Structure Building) and three L2 development theories (Missing Surface Inflection Representational Deficit Hypothesis and Feature Reassembly). French and English differ in terms of word order with negation, adverbs and object clitics. This book empirically examines six theories of language acquisition by considering the acquisition of French word order by instructed English-speaking learners.
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