How Advanced Learners of Japanese Manage the use of Referentials

A Narrative Discourse by Native Speakers of English and Chinese

Abstract

This study investigates how advanced learners of the Japanese language also to be referred to as Chinese-speaking learner (CH) of Japanese, English-speaking learner (EN) of Japanese and native speakers (NSs) of Japanese manage the use of the referent markers in order to demonstrate topic continuity in Japanese oral narratives. Narrative discourse was produced by two groups of learners of Japanese, Chinese whose native language is typologically parallel to and English speakers whose native language is distant from Japanese.

The results showed that (1) both CHs and ENs used the indefinite marking (-ga) to encode referent introduction, as a target-like use. However some CHs and ENs still have difficulty using the indefinite marking (-ga) for this situation because they don't have such rules in their native languages. (2) ENs and NSs use zero anaphora to encode re-introduction of referents. In contrast, CHs tend to use full noun form followed by "wa". CHs attempted to avoid ambiguity and used full noun with "wa" when referents are re-established as the "on-going" topic of the discourse. (3) Both CHs and ENs performed zero anaphora as a target-like use of re-introduction of referents and referent maintenance even though zero anaphora is not the case in English.