A Generative Analysis of the Acquisition of Negation by Iranian EFL Learners: A Typological Study

The present study was an attempt to investigate the acquisition of negationproperties by Persian monolingual and Kurdish-Persian bilingual learners of Englishacross different levels of language proficiency and within a generative framework.Generative models are generally concerned with issues such as universal grammar(UG), language transfer, and morphological variability in nonprimary languagedevelopment. Hence, an attempt was made to test the claims and predictions madeby a number of generative theories specifically FTFA, RDH, DA, MSIH, SSH, andMSBH. To do so, 180 Persian monolingual and Kurdish-Persian bilingual learnersof English participated in the study. Based on the Oxford Placement Test, they wereassigned to 3 levels of language proficiency. They, then, received a grammaticalityjudgment test and a translation task. The results revealed that there was, first, nosignificant difference between the performance of the monolingual and bilinguallearners at each level of language proficiency, whereas the difference wasstatistically significant across the levels of proficiency, and second, no singlegenerative theory can offer a comprehensive explanation about the whole process ofL2-L3 negation acquisition. Indeed, language development occurs in an incrementalmanner as predicted by MSBH, and the resetting of TL properties is possible withincreasing level of proficiency. The findings also confirmed that knowledge of anL2 does not play a significant role in the development of the interlanguagegrammars of Kurdish-Persian bilinguals, and increased L2/L3 exposure and use leadto less language transfer and consequently approximation to native-likeperformance. Each of these findings has been discussed in the framework of therelated theories tested in the study.