The syntactic nature of negative concord (NC) is still under debate. On the one hand, some theoretical accounts connect the emergence of NC to the high position of negation in sentence structure. On the other hand, some studies establish a relationship between NC and the internal syntactic properties of Negative Concord Items (NCI) in a language. In particular, it is still an open question whether NCIs in NC-systems behave like negative quantifiers (as German niemand) or Negative Polarity Items (NPI, as English anybody). The goal of the present project is to contribute to this debate by studying the acquisition of NC in Italian as a second language.

We investigate how the acquisition of NC in L2-Italian is affected by cross-linguistic influence as determined by different types of L1s by considering learners with L1-Spanish (a NC-system), L1-English (a non-NC system featuring negative polarity items and negative quantifiers) and L1-German (a non-NC system featuring negative quantifiers). We expect the cross-linguistic differences between the three L1s and Italian to affect the paths and outcomes of L2 acquisition. More specifically, the complexity of the learning task experienced by the three groups of L2 speakers will provide an indication of the nature of NCIs. If Italian NCIs are more similar to NPIs in not being real negative elements, English speakers should be able to acquire them more easily than German speakers and show a similar acquisition path as Spanish speakers. This is due to the fact that their L1 English allows for NPI in addition to negative quantifiers. If, on the contrary, Italian NCIs are more similar to negative quantifiers, learners with German or English as L1 should exhibit the same acquisition path and crucially differ from learners with Spanish as L1.