Mika Kizu

L2 Acquisition of Null Subjects in Japanese: A New Generative Perspective and Its Pedagogical Implications

This chapter explores what the outcome of a generative SLA study of null subjects can contribute to the field of instructed SLA and strives to serve as a bridge between generative syntactic analyses and potential classroom practices. The study focuses on null subjects in L2 Japanese at the levels of elementary to pre-advanced proficiencies. Adopting Hasegawa’s (Sci Approach Lang 7:1–34. Center for Language Sciences, Kanda University of International Studies, 2008; Agreement at the CP level: clause types and the ‘person’ restriction on the subject. In: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics: The Proceedings of the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, vol. 5, pp 131–152, 2009) analysis, null subjects in Japanese main clauses have two types: first-/second-person subjects licensed by agreement in the domain of modality and third-person subjects identified in context. This dichotomy is also manifested in the experimental findings, which are (1) the elementary learners had more difficulty identifying the referents of null first- or second-person subjects than those of null third-person subjects and (2) learners at all levels demonstrated underuse of null subjects especially in first-/second-person contexts. Based on these results, the chapter argues that null subjects can clearly be a target of focus on form instruction, but not of focus on formS or focus on meaning, and elaborates on how the results obtained in the experiment should be interpreted within the methodology of focus on form.

Japanese Modals at the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface

This chapter narrows down the scope of modality studies in Japanese and focuses on how Japanese modal predicates are syntactically represented within the framework of generative grammar. While various modal expressions in Japanese are discussed throughout the volume, how such linguistic items should be analysed in syntactic structures is not taken up as a main topic in any other chapter. In order to fill in this gap, this chapter presents some of the recently proposed syntactic analyses concerning Japanese modal predicates and discusses where in the syntax Japanese modality can be represented. In particular, we look at so-called ‘person restrictions’ on the subjects of modal (and modal-related) predicates in Japanese, which will lead us to discuss further theoretical implications in the spirit of the minimalist program (Chomsky 1995, 2001 and others).

Topicalization and Cleft Constructions

The main purpose of this chapter is to show that cleft constructions in Japanese parallel topic constructions in syntactic structure. This basic line of analysis has already been claimed by Hoji (1990), but we will explore further into this issue here, and will argue for a slightly different analysis from Hoji’s.

Resumptive A’-Dependencies

In Chapter 3, we examined the basic properties of presuppositional clauses in Japanese clefts. Let us now extend the domain of inquiry from simple cleft constructions to more complex cleft sentences.

Nominalizations in Cleft Constructions

In Chapter 2, we observed that cleft constructions are closely related to topicalization and do not involve a scrambling operation, and that the focus position in clefts must be occupied by a single constituent. While we briefly examined the internal structure of the predicate of clefts to explain this second property, we have not looked closely at the internal structure of the nominalized clauses (or presuppositional clauses) of the constructions. This will be the major concern of this chapter.

Ellipsis in Cleft Constructions

Chapter 5 is an extension of our investigation of cleft constructions in Japanese; in particular, we will examine so-called ‘sluicing’ in the language. It has been proposed in previous research that, unlike English elided structures, Japanese sluicing is derived from cleft constructions (Kizu 1997, Kuwabara 1995, 1996, Nishiyama 1995, Nishiyama, Whitman and Yi 1996). In this analysis, presuppositional clauses are phonologically empty or deleted given an appropriate linguistic antecedent, and only focus phrases occur in elided sentences.