L2 Acquisition of Definiteness Marking by Japanese Demonstrative Sono

Abstract

This study investigates L2 acquisition of the definiteness marking function of the Japanese demonstrative, sono. Japanese sono optionally marks nominal definiteness in direct and indirect (bridging) anaphoric contexts, but it is incompatible with non-anaphoric contexts. Knowledge of sono is compared between two L2 groups: native speakers of Korean and English. Korean has a demonstrative, ku, with properties corresponding to sono. English, however, does not have such a lexical item—its definite article the and demonstrative that functionally overlap with sono and ku only partially. We examine whether this crosslinguistic variation leads to any difference between L1-Korean and L1-English speakers' acquisition of Japanese sono in direct anaphoric, bridging, and non-anaphoric contexts. The results of an acceptability judgement task confirmed that native Japanese speakers are sensitive to the incompatibility of sono with non-anaphoric contexts, and that they prefer explicit definiteness marking by sono despite its optional nature. The L2 groups demonstrated a degree of knowledge of the properties of sono in all contexts, regardless of L1. Crucially, the L2 speakers showed robust evidence for the incompatibility of sono with non-anaphoric contexts, which suggests that they can acquire this core property of sono. However, native-level sensitivity did not arise in the other two contexts. We propose that this contextual difference may be due to the quality of the evidence for the form-meaning mapping. Specifically, the mapping is less transparent in direct and bridging anaphoric contexts, where sono is optional, than in non-anaphoric contexts, where sono is consistently infelicitous.