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Universal Grammar and the Acquisition of Japanese Syntax

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Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 41))

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Abstract

Within the framework of generative grammar, knowledge of our native language is assumed to be acquired through the interaction between biologically predetermined UG and the linguistic experience children take in after birth. If this acquisitional scenario is on the right track, we can expect that the core portion of the grammar is acquired fairly early, since the innate UG constrains the course of acquisition from the beginning of life and hence children do not have to learn much from the experience. In this chapter, we review several studies on the acquisition of Japanese that directly evaluate the validity of this acquisitional scenario. Since Japanese has various syntactic characteristics that are not observed in Germanic or Romance languages, the investigation of its acquisition process can be especially valuable to determine the plausibility of the above scenario. The properties discussed in this chapter include: basic word order, scrambling, passive, wh-in-situ and its constraints, the anaphoric use of zibun, and structure dependence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Q(uestion)-particle no can be omitted when the sentence is pronounced with an appropriate questioning intonation. See Yoshida and Yoshida (1997) and Ko (2005) for detailed discussion of the Q-particle drop phenomenon.

  2. 2.

    The syntactic derivation of SVO sentences in Japanese is now under heated discussion. See Tanaka (2001), Takita (2009), and the references cited there.

  3. 3.

    However, the word-order alternation in ditransitive sentences seems to pose some difficulty to Japanese-speaking children. See Sugisaki and Isobe (2001) for relevant discussion.

  4. 4.

    See e.g. Richards (2008) for detailed discussion.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mie University, Tsu, Mie, Japan

    Koji Sugisaki

  2. Linguistics, Keio University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan Minato, Tokyo, Japan

    Yukio Otsu

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  1. Koji Sugisaki
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  2. Yukio Otsu
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Correspondence to Koji Sugisaki .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Dept. of Psychology, Smith College, Bass Hall 401, Northampton, 01063, Massachusetts, USA

    Jill de Villiers

  2. , Linguistics Dept., 226 South College, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst, 01003, Massachusetts, USA

    Tom Roeper

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Sugisaki, K., Otsu, Y. (2011). Universal Grammar and the Acquisition of Japanese Syntax. In: de Villiers, J., Roeper, T. (eds) Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1688-9_8

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