A Study Based on Processability Theory and the Developmental Sequence of Japanese Benefactives for Learners of Japanese as a Second Language: Utilizing International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS)

Abstract

This study seeks to predict and verify the developmental process of Japanese benefactives, -teageru, -tekureru, -temorau based on Lexical Mapping Hypothesis (LMH), which is one of the hypotheses of Processability Theory (PT). The -teageru and -tekureru constructions have the same mapping structures according to the LMH analysis of benefactives. LMH also predicts that compared to -teageru and -tekureru, -temorau has a complex mapping structure, which makes the processing difficult for Japanese language learners. Utilizing the language corpus of 100 subjects in I-JAS, the study verified the developmental sequence of -teageru, -tekureru, -temorau. The results from the Implicational Scaling, which PT adopts as a distributional analysis, show that implicational relatives exist in the developmental sequence of benefactives among the learners of Japanese as [-teageru·-tekureru>-temorau] (C_scal=.89).