2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The acquisition of genitive -'sand ofby Japanese learners of English
| Project/Area Number |
17520386
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Foreign language education
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| Research Institution | Chuo University |
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Principal Investigator |
WAKABAYASHI Shigenori Chuo University, Faculty of Literature, Professor (80291962)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2005 – 2007
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| Keywords | Japanese learners of English / genitive case / morpheme / Ll influence / syntax / grammaticality judgment / learner corpus |
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| Research Abstract |
We carried out a review of theoretical works and empirical studies, including investigations into a learner corpus and conducting an experiment. In the review, we mainly focused on Nishiyama's (2003) description of Japanese genitive no and Rappaport's (2004) and Rozwadowska's (2006) works on the English pre-nominal genitive-'s and the post-nominal genitive of. Based on these studies, we described similarities and differences among these three morphemes. With regard to the learner corpus, we used the NICT JLE Corpus (Izumi, Uchimoto, and Isahara, 2004), and illustrated some characteristics in Japanese learners' production of English genitive-'s and of. Our findings showed that i) Japanese learners tend to use of more often than-'s; ii) they differentiate these two morphemes in a similar way as native speakers do; iii) they produce errors which are likely to be due to their first language grammar; iv)learners tend to frequently produce the genitive of when their general proficiency in English becomes higher; but v) the same tendency was not observed with regard to pre-nominal genitive marker-'s. We carried out an experiment with seventy-four Japanese learners of English and twenty-one native speakers of English. The purpose of this experiment was to examine their knowledge of constraints involving the use of the two genitive markers with the arguments of de-Verbal nouns. We set up our material based on Haegeman and Gueron (1999), but native speakers did not behave as we had expected, and hence we failed to obtain data relevant to answer our questions. This is because native speakers' interpretation and judgment of sentences were highly sensitive to semantic and pragmatic aspects which we did not anticipate. We intend to carry out further research after this project.
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Research Products
(12 results)
