Croatian secondary school students’ errors in forming syntactic negation in English

The acquisition of negation in the second language has been investigated in numerous studies (Cancino et al., 1975; Meisel, 1997;Fuentes, 2008), however, there are no systematic studies of the acquisition of the English negation by speakers of the Croatian language. The aim of this paper is to gain a better insight into the types and frequency of errors in a relatively free production of negation in English as a second language. The analysis is based on the hypotheses that errors in sentences where the so called dummy do has to be inserted in the negative sentence, omissions of auxiliary verbs, and double marking errors are expected. The analysis is based on a questionnaire consisting of one task of positive to negative sentence transformations. The answers were grouped according to the error type. Errors classified as “other” were the most frequent (37 %), followed by double marking and congruency errors (14 %), omissions (12 %), and additions (9 %). The results corroborate the frequency hypothesis of errors in sentences where the so called dummy do had to be inserted in the negative sentence, which may be attributed to negative interference from Croatian as the first language.