Abstract
In this article, I present a new syntactic analysis of the negative marker no in child English. The main claim of the article is that the majority of no constructions in early child English are determiner phrases (DPs) in which no appears as a determiner. This claim is supported on the basis of distributional and morphosyntactic tests, a discourse analysis of children's elliptical negatives, and a comparison of no constructions in child and adult English. These results suggest that the Sentence Operator analysis, the standard analysis of child English no for more than 30 years, is untenable as a general analysis of child English no. The results also suggest that although children make many mistakes using no, they represent no as a determiner in abstract syntax and control the Phonetic Form principles that regulate the use of discourse ellipsis with no DPs at a very early age.
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