Cover not available
Part of
Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. Whitman
Edited by Kunio Nishiyama, Hideki Kishimoto and Edith Aldridge
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 250] 2018
► pp. 229–251

Chapter 11
An experimental study of children’s comprehension of lexical and productive causatives in Japanese

| Ochanomizu University
| Kyushu Sangyo University
| Ochanomizu University
| Ochanomizu University
| Ochanomizu University

This article experimentally investigates children’s comprehension of causative constructions in Japanese and compares the acquisition of lexical and productive causatives in Japanese. The results of our experiments show that children correctly comprehend direct causative meanings of lexical causative verbs quite early, but that they often misinterpret indirect causative meanings of productive causatives, which suggests that the acquisition of indirect causative meanings of productive causatives is delayed. We suggest the delay of the acquisition of productive causatives is due to children’s misplacement of the causative morpheme sase in the structure of productive causatives, which is compatible with the analysis of children’s natural speech data in Murasugi and Hashimoto (2004) and Murasugi, Hashimoto and Fuji (2007).

Keywords: first language acquisition, lexical causatives, sociative causatives, productive causatives, direct/indirect causative meanings, the question-after-story task, the truth value judgment task, the picture selection task, mono-clausal/bi-clausal structures, blocking effects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous acquisition studies of causatives in Japanese
    • 2.1 Murasugi & Hashimoto 2004 and Murasugi, Hashimoto & Fuji 2007
    • 2.2 Okabe (2008)
  • 3.Experiments
    • 3.1Experiment 1
      • 3.1.1Method
      • 3.1.2Results of Experiment 1
    • 3.2Experiment 2
      • 3.2.1Picture selection task
        • 3.2.1.1Method
        • 3.2.1.2Results of the picture selection task
      • 3.2.2Truth value judgment task
        • 3.2.2.1Method
        • 3.2.2.2Results of the truth value judgment task
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.250.12yam
References
Brown, R.
1973 A First Language: The Early Stage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crain, S. & Thornton, R.
1998 Investigations in Universal Grammar. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
De Villiers, J. & Roeper, T.
1996 Questions after stories: On supplying context and eliminating it as a variable. In Methods for Assessing Children's Syntax, D. McDaniel, C. McKee & H. S. Cairns (eds), 163–187. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Embick, D. & A., Marantz
(2008) Architecture and blocking. Linguistic Inquiry 39: 1–53.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harley, H.
1995 Subjects, Events and Licensing. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
2008 On the causative construction. In The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, S. Miyagawa & M. Saito (eds), 22–53. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Inoue, K.
1976 Henkei Bunpoo to Nihongo. Tokyo: Taishukan.Google Scholar
Jacobsen, W.
1992 The Transitive Structure of Events in Japanese. Tokyo: Kuroshio.Google Scholar
Kuczaj, S.
1977 The acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16(5): 589–600.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuno, S.
1973 The Structure of the Japanese Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kuroda, S. -Y.
1965a Generative Grammatical Studies in the Japanese Language. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
1965b Causative forms in Japanese. Foundations of Language 1: 30–50.Google Scholar
Matsumoto, Y.
2000 On the crosslinguistic parameterization of causative predicates: Implications from Japanese and other languages. In Argument Realization, M. Butt & T. H. King (eds), 135–169. Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B.
2000 The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Miyagawa, S.
1980 Complex Verbs and the Lexicon. PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson.Google Scholar
1984 Blocking and Japanese causatives. Lingua 64: 177–207.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1989 Structure and Case Marking in Japanese. New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
2012 Blocking and causatives revisited: Unexpected competition across derivations. In Case, Argument Structure, and Word Order, 195–216. Oxford: Routledge.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murasugi, K. & Hashimoto, T.
2004 Three pieces of acquisition evidence for the v-VP frame. Nanzan Linguistics 1: 1–19.Google Scholar
Murasugi, K., Hashimoto, T. & Fuji, C.
2007 VP-shell analysis for the acquisition of Japanese intransitives verbs, transitive verbs, and causatives. Linguistics 45: 615–651.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Noji, J.
1974–1977 Youji no Gengoseikatsu no Jittai I-IV (Language use in childhood). Tokyo: Bunka Hyoron Shuppan.Google Scholar
Okabe, R.
2008 Child Causatives: Acquisition of Bi-clausal Structures in Japanese. PhD dissertation, UCLA.Google Scholar
Shibatani, M.
1973 Semantics of Japanese causativization. Foundations of Language 9: 327–373.Google Scholar
1976 The grammar of causative constructions: A conspectus. In The Grammar of Causative Constructions, [Syntax and Semantics 6] M. Shibatani (ed.), 1–142. New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Shibatani, M. & Chung, S. Y.
2001 Japanese and Korean causatives revisited. Kobe Papers in Linguistics 3: 112–135, Kobe University.Google Scholar
Shibatani, M. & Pardeshi, P.
2002 The causative continuum. In The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation, M. Shibatani (ed.), 85–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Guasti, Maria Teresa, Artemis Alexiadou & Uli Sauerland
2023. Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives. Frontiers in Psychology 14 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.