Negation in French–Chinese, German–Chinese and English–Chinese Interlanguages

This article reports on an empirical study of L2 acquisition of Chinese negation by French‐, German‐ and English‐speaking learners. With regard to the syntactic structure of clausal negation, French and German are different from Chinese while English and Chinese are similar. It was hypothesised that it would be easier for English‐speaking learners than for French‐ and German‐speaking learners to acquire the syntactic structure of Chinese negation. However, this hypothesis is disconfirmed by the results of the study; little variation is found between the L2 groups in the acquisition of Chinese negation and their behaviours are all native‐like. These results present a challenge to some influential L2‐acquisition hypotheses. The findings suggest that L2 grammars can have fully and appropriately specified features of functional categories from the initial stage of L2 acquisition even though these features may have different values in learners’ L1s.