2018 Sat Poster 6412

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Acquisition of floating quantifiers by L1 English speakers of L2 Japanese
T. Okuma

This study investigates acquisition of floating numeral quantifiers (FNQs) by L1 English speakers of L2 Japanese. Japanese allows scrambling, and accordingly, numeral quantifiers (NQs) appear in different syntactic environments, including prenominal, post nominal, and floating positions, as in (1). It is also known that Japanese FNQs observe a semantic constraint. As Table 1 shows, when the NQ is not floating but adjacent to its host noun, the sentence has either a distributive or a collective reading. In contrast, when the NQ floats, the sentence has only a distributive reading. For example, the sentence in (1c) means that each of the three students painted a picture individually (i.e., the distributive reading) and it does not mean that three students together painted a picture (i.e., the collective reading) (Ishii 1999, Nakanishi 2007, 2008). Nakanishi (2007) suggests that the unavailability of collective readings of FNQs is attributable to the fact that FNQs are in the VP domain, wherein the monotonicity constraint applies (Schwarzschild, 2002). By contrast, English NQs do not float (Kobuchi-Philip 2006), and they are free from the monotonicity constraint. Therefore, in order to interpret Japanese FNQs,  L1 English speakers need to acquire that (i) NQs can float and (ii) FNQs have only distributive readings in Japanese due to the semantic constraint.

In previous L2 studies, Japanese FNQs have been used as a diagnostic to judge L2ers’ knowledge of unaccusativity because only unaccusative structures, not energative structures, allow FNQs in Japanese (Sorace & Shomura 2001, Fukuda 2017). Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the semantic constraint on FNQs. Consequently, little is known about whether L2ers truly interpret FNQs as do native Japanese speakers.

In the experiment, a truth value judgment task was administered to 35 native English speakers studying Japanese and 20 native Japanese speakers. In the task, the participants judged whether the written Japanese sentences with FNQs matched the meaning of the given contexts, which provided either collective or distributive interpretation, as in (2). The L2ers’ knowledge of FNQs were also tested in an independent Japanese language proficiency test, and they were divided into two proficiency groups: intermediate and advanced. The results so far suggest two points. First, the native Japanese group did not reject the collective reading of FNQs as strongly as pointed out in the literature. They accepted the illicit collective reading more than half of the time (73%) although this was significantly smaller than the acceptance rate of the licit  distributive reading (87%). Second, the group result suggest that L2ers did not distinguish the interpretive difference between the FNQs and non-FNQs. They generally rejected FNQs irrespective of the readings, about 60% of the time. Nevertheless, the individual result shows that some of the advanced L2ers are indistinguishable from native Japanese speakers in interpreting FNQs. Their results are in line with previous L2 studies on the syntax–semantics interface, including Dekydspotter and Sprouse (2001) and Dekydspotter, Sprouse, and Swanson (2001), suggesting that advanced L2ers successfully acquire subtle interpretative differences between different syntactic forms in L2s.

References

Dekydspotter, L. & Sprouse, R. (2001). Mental design and (second) language epistemology: adjectival restrictions of wh-quantifiers and tense in English-French interlanguage. Second Language Research 17, 1–35. Nakanishi, K. (2007). Measurement in the nominal and verbal domains. Linguistics and Philosophy 30, 235–276. Schwarzschild, R. (2002). The grammar of measurement. The Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory XII, 225–245. Sorace, A. & Shomura, Y. (2001). Lexical constraints on the acquisition of split intransitivity. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23, 247–278