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Part of
Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity
Edited by Elena Babatsouli
[Studies in Bilingualism 67] 2024
► pp. 529–555

Chapter 20
On the nature of operators in the grammar of L1 Chinese learners of L2 Japanese

| Osaka University
| Chukyo University
| Waseda University
| Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University

Under the current generative framework (Chomsky, 1993, 1995), this paper examined the acquisition of wh-questions and conditional sentences in the L2 Japanese grammar of L1 Chinese learners, focusing on whether properties of wh-phrases divergent across languages can be acquired in L2. We used an acceptability judgement task and conducted the experiment online. Theoretically, the study investigated the acquisition of operator-variable chains in their grammar. The results showed that their L2 Japanese grammar is a mixture of L1 Chinese and L2 Japanese. This apparent inconsistency most likely results from the way that operators are fully construed with all the necessary features in place: Chinese operators are formed in the lexicon, while Japanese ones are construed in core syntax (Saito, 2017, 2021). The current finding is taken as support for the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2008, 2009), which states that L2 learners reassemble L1 features in order to construct L2 grammar.

Keywords: Chinese, features, Japanese, movement, wh-indeterminates, wh-phrases
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Previous research on wh-movement in L2 acquisition
    • 3.1Towards explaining the L2 development
    • 3.2Recent feature-based proposals on L2 acquisition models
    • 3.3Previous proposal on wh-movement in L2 Japanese grammar of L1 Chinese learners
    • 3.4Recent feature-based proposal on wh-movement in L2 English grammar of L1 Chinese learners
    • 3.5Research questions
  • 4.Experiment
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Test materials and procedure
  • 4.3Data analysis and results
    • 4.4Wh-questions
    • 4.5Conditional sentences
    • 4.6Additional analysis
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Feature sets and acquisition of operator-variable chains
    • 5.2Connecting the current proposal to Kimura (2022)
    • 5.3Connecting the current proposal to Umeda (2008)
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.20miy
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