Case/Focus Interaction in Young Children’s Interpretationof dake (only) in Japanese

Abstract

We present children’s non-adult interpretation of sentences that contain the focus particle dake, using the Truth-Value Judgment Task (Crain and Thornton 1998). Our first observation is that children interpreted sentences with dake differently when dake was attached to the subject and to the object (the subject/object asymmetry in the interpretation of dake). We also observed that children interpreted sentences with dake differently when dake was followed by a case particle (the ‘particle/no-particle asymmetry’). Any theory based on the assumption that the Japanese employs an abstract Case feature system fails to capture the systematic pattern shown in children’s non-adult interpretations of dake. Our data provide empirical support for a syntactic theory proposed in Aoyagi (2006), which distinguishes the nature of Nominative and Accusative case particles (ga and o), as well as assumes different derivations for sentences containing dake, depending on whether it is followed by a case particle or not.