Acquisition of the Imperfective Aspect Marker -te i (ru) by L2 Learners of Japanese

Expressing Temporal Relations Between Events

Abstract

This study focuses on one of the functions of imperfective aspect marker -te i (ru), the expression of temporal relations between events (taxis-function), and investigates when it becomes possible for L2 learners to use it. Within the framework of Processability Theory, Mine (2015) hypothesizes that L2 learners are able to use the taxis-function of -te i (ru) once they reach the developmental stage where they can process information between clauses/sentences; she analyzes only L2 learners' errors, however. This study aims to confirm the Japanese developmental stage Mine (2015) hypothesized by examining learners' appropriate use of the taxis-function of -te i- (ru) and B-type conjunctions, which are also hypothesized to belong to the same stage. It explores learners' data (N=234) in a spoken Japanese learners' language corpus, elicited through storytelling, which has contexts for using the taxis-function of -te i (ru) and B-type conjunctions. A distributional analysis of these two features was conducted and tested by implicational scaling. The result does not show any valid scalability between these two, thereby supporting the hypothesis that both of them belong to the same stage where learners can process information between clauses/sentences.