Argument structure and syntactic development in Japanese as a second language

This chapter presents an application of Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann 1998 and further developments (Pienemann, Di Biase & Kawaguchi, in this volume)) as a theoretical framework to the acquisition of Japanese L2 morphosyntax. A range of Japanese L2 morphosyntactic structures are hypothesised at given PT developmental stages with their grammatical formalisation based on Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). In order to test the hypothesised PT stages in Japanese, speech data were collected from two concurrent longitudinal studies of English L1 learners of Japanese over periods of two and three years respectively. Then distributional analyses were conducted for the purpose of examining the developmental sequences of syntactic structures. Results were checked against the hypothesised Japanese L2 PT stages. These results suggest that the hypothesised stages are implicational, indicating that the hypothesis is supported