Negation and word order in Hungarian child language

Abstract

The study provides a quantitative analysis of longitudinal naturalistic language data from young Hungarian children. The main concern of the analysis is the development of word order restrictions triggered by negation and certain other linguistic features, such as focussing and subjunctive mood. It is found that the mastery of the word order requirements of negation is slightly delayed relative to the development of ordering restrictions associated with other features. Some aspects of the data suggest that initially the children may rely on lexicalised construction templates in selecting the appropriate word order configuration.