Lexical V-V compounds in child Japanese: An experimental study
-
Miwa Isobe
,
Reiko Okabe
Abstract
Japanese is known to have verbal compounds consisting of two verbs (hereafter “V-V compounds”), and many theoretical studies have shown that V-V compounds can be divided into two types: lexical and syntactic V-V compounds (Kageyama 1993, among many others). A recent study by Kageyama (2013, 2016a, 2016b) points out that the lexical V-V compounds can be further categorized into two types, one of which can be paraphrased as the V-te V sequence. The aim of our current study is to elucidate based on experimental data whether Japanese-speaking children aged 4-5 can correctly comprehend lexical V-V compounds and differentiate them from the V-te V sequence which are superficially similar to but syntactically distinct from them. Our experiment reveals that children can differentiate between the syntactic properties of these constructions and thus have acquired the two different constructions consisting of two-verb sequences by the time they turn 4 years old.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the children, parents and staff of Kazenoko Nursery School, Tokyo, Japan, for agreeing to let us conduct our experiment there, and to the audience of TEAL-9 for feedback on an earlier version of the study. This study was partially supported by JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) Grant Number 15K02510.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Lexical V-V compounds in child Japanese: An experimental study
- Psychological deictic –te kuru compared to passive: The case of victims’ stories in Japanese
- Japanese pronoun hon-nin
- On the grammaticalization of Japanese verbal negative marker
- Onset Cy and High Vowel Devoicing in Japanese
- How native speakers of Japanese try to sound polite
- Book Review
- Mineharu Nakayama Yi-ching Su Aijun Huang John Benjamins: Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In Honor of Stephen Crain
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Lexical V-V compounds in child Japanese: An experimental study
- Psychological deictic –te kuru compared to passive: The case of victims’ stories in Japanese
- Japanese pronoun hon-nin
- On the grammaticalization of Japanese verbal negative marker
- Onset Cy and High Vowel Devoicing in Japanese
- How native speakers of Japanese try to sound polite
- Book Review
- Mineharu Nakayama Yi-ching Su Aijun Huang John Benjamins: Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In Honor of Stephen Crain
