The Role of Universal Semantic Features in L2 English Article Choice by L1 Japanese Speakers

Abstract

It is widely known that second language (L2) English learners misuse articles. Interestingly, recent studies (Ionin, Ko, & Wexler, 2004; Ko, Ionin, & Wexler, 2010; among others) have shown that L2 learner errors are not random but constrained by universal semantic features such as definiteness, specificity and partitivity. This study investigates how these semantic features affect Japanese speakers in their English article choice, adopting the same data collection strategy (forced elicitation task) as Ko et al. (2010). I mainly focus on partitivity effects, which have yet to be studied with L1 Japanese speakers. The results indicate that partitivity triggered errors in the Japanese speakers' article choices, which provides further evidence for the argument in the previous studies that L2 learners commit systematic errors in choosing articles as a result of their access to the semantic feature inventory in Universal Grammar. It is also, however, found that the effects of the semantic features are not equal. Specifically, the experimental data suggests the possibility that the effects of specificity might be more persistent than those of partitivity. It is then argued that over the course of the acquisition of English articles, L2 learners may go through a stage where specificity exerts stronger influence on them than partitivity, and the disparity in effect size could be attributed to the greater difficulty of determining the value of specificity on the basis of the context. That is, learners may have trouble with the valuation of specificity in some contexts while they are less likely to do so with partitivity. Consequently, L2 learners may not have received indirect negative evidence necessary to learn that specificity, unlike definiteness, plays no role in the selection of English articles.