Языки народов зарубежных стран Европы, Азии, Африки | Филологический аспект №09 (65) Сентябрь 2020
УДК 811.521
Дата публикации 21.09.2020
Japanese EFL learners’ interpretation of plural –s as an example of conceptual transfer
Tretiakova Elizaveta Sergeevna
Yokohama National University, Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama, Japan, elizaveta.tretiakovastrauss@gmail.com
Аннотация: This article examines Japanese EFL learners’ interpretation of the English plural marker -s. The main goal of the article is to find out the role of transfer in the Japanese EFL learners’ acquisition of plural morphology. The author conducted a Truth Value Judgement experiment with Japanese intermediate learners to find out how Japanese EFL learners perceive bare plurals. The results of the experiment suggest that the Japanese EFL learners often failed to detect the plural-only readings of bare plural sentences, while they did not have any difficulties with comprehension of numeral sentences. This performance can be explained by the conceptual transfer.
Ключевые слова: Second Language Acquisition, Japanese EFL learners, Bare Plurals, Numerals, Truth Value Judgement Task, General Number, Language Transfer, Conceptual Transfer
Третьякова Е.С.Japanese EFL learners’ interpretation of plural –s as an example of conceptual transfer // Филологический аспект: международный научно-практический журнал. 2020. № 09 (65). Режим доступа: https://scipress.ru/philology/articles/japanese-efl-learners’-interpretation-of-plural-s-as-an-example-of-conceptual-transfer.html (Дата обращения: 21.09.2020)
1. Introduction
In recent years the acquisition of English plural morphology by learners of non-number-marking languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as opposed to number-marking-languages such as English has been under discussion (see Jiang, 2007; Jiang & Novokshanova & Masuda & Wang, 2011; Wen & Miyao & Takeda & Chu & Schwartz, 2010; Song, 2015; Mansbridge & Tamaoka, 2018, among others).
During the 40s and 50s, transfer of the first language was regarded as the major factor of importance in L2 acquisition. However, longitudinal studies of L2 acquisition revealed that L1 transfer did not always take place where expected, but that there were sometimes occurrences of non-transfer [Hakansson, 2001].
Learning whether English nouns are countable or not has been causing great difficulties for many ESL/EFL learners [Tsang, 2017]. Likewise, much research shows that Japanese learners of English have great difficulty in understanding English noun countability [Takahashi, 2013].
The main goal of this paper is to find out the role of transfer in the Japanese EFL learners’ acquisition of plural morphology. After giving an outline over some popular hypotheses (Full Access/Full Transfer, Conceptual Transfer etc.) in the field of L2 acquisition and language transfer an experiment previously conducted by the author will be briefly explained to see if the results could be explained by any of these ideas. The hypothesis of this paper is that Japanese speakers’ difficulties in noun countability are caused by conceptual transfer.
2. Full Access/Full Transfer Hypothesis
The Universal Grammar (UG) approach claims that the natural acquisition of a second language is possible because of the innate linguistic knowledge of structural constraints that organize the learner’s processing of the input data [Epstein, Flynn, Martohardjono, 1996]. This theory includes the Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis [Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996].
By ‘Full transfer and full access’ Schwartz and Sprouse mean full transfer from L1 to L2. According to the model, adult learners use a mixture of their L1 and universally applicable syntax knowledge in their L2 development. They are already in possession of a fully developed speech system when beginning to acquire L2, thus often tempted to rely on this knowledge. At first learners would use similar parameters for L2 as in L1, and only with further input would they develop a feeling for the correct L2 usage [Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996].
Two other researchers, Dietrich and Schmidt, conducted another analysis on this topic in 2015 based on a broader database and more controlled types of data. According to their results, conclusive evidence to support the Full Transfer/Full Access model could not be found [Dietrich & Schmidt, 2015].
3. Failed Functional Feature Hypothesis and Shallow Structure Hypothesis
The Failed Functional Feature Hypothesis (FFFH) by Hawkins and Chan (1997) states that non-existent functional morphemes in L1 have a negative influence on L2 acquisition. That is why such morphemes are inaccessible to L2 learners [Ninpanit & Pongpairoj, 2016]. Hawkins and Chan propose that certain functional features from the L1 will not be revised to fit the L2; they will exist instead as failed functional features that deviate from those of native speakers [Hirsch, 2014].
Clahsen and Felser (2006) suggested Shallow Structure Hypothesis. They analyzed the performance of monolingual children and adult second language (L2) learners and compared their performance with that of adult monolinguals. The results of the study concluded that child first language (L1) processing is basically the same as adult L1 processing, with differences in performance caused by cognitive developmental limitations. They claim that the syntactic representations computed by L2 learners during comprehension are ‘shallower and less detailed’ than those computed by native speakers [Clahsen & Felser, 2006, p.32]. The second idea of SSH is that there is little to no L1 transfer in the domain of language processing, thus, the prediction is that L2 learners, regardless of their L1s, will perform more similarly to each other than they will to native speakers.
Since the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) was first put forward in 2006, it has inspired a lot of research on grammatical processing of L2. In 2016 Clahsen and Felser published a paper where some issues regarding the SSH were clarified. According to that paper, SSH does not claim that “L2 learners can never achieve native-like syntactic parsing” [Clahsen & Felser, 2016].
Clahsen and Felser claim that some aspects of the L2 grammatical knowledge are less robust than knowledge of the L1 grammar [Clahsen & Felser, 2016]. By claiming this, they completely change the idea of the traditional view of grammatical knowledge as a categorical property, according to which a given speaker either “knows” or “does not know” a particular grammatical rule or constraint. Terms such as “less robust,” however, suggest that there are gradient differences between the L1 and the L2 grammar that can in principle be quantified. It has to be mentioned, however, that they do not offer any formal model that could capture such gradient differences.
4. Conceptual transfer
We also have to distinguish between the conceptual transfer and linguistic transfer. At the informal level, the conceptual transfer refers to the observation that language learners, L2 users, bilinguals and multilinguals from different language backgrounds sometimes express objects, events, qualities and relationships in conceptually different ways. At a more formal level, it refers to the investigation of cross-linguistic influence in cognitive linguistics and how mental concepts of L1 influence L2 [Jarvis, 2011].
Minkkinen (2015) claims that conceptual and linguistic transfer both refer to the same event - the transfer of an L1 structure to the production of an L2 structure, which involves the creation of mental links between these two structures. The difference is the cognitive level where transfer occurs: linguistic transfer occurs at the linguistic level; the learner recalls the L1 structure and applies it to the L2. Conceptual transfer, on the other hand, occurs at the conceptual level; the learner is more familiar with the meaning of the L1 concept, and ascribes this meaning to the L2 structure involving a similar one [Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008, p.23, as cited in Minkkinen, 2015].
An example of the conceptual transfer is the way in which Japanese and English express grammatical number. Japanese is a classifier language, where objects are classified by, for example, their shape, and no distinction between one item or multiple is made. English, as a noun class language, divides nouns into count nouns and mass nouns, and plurality is expressed by adding a morpheme [Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008, p.136]. Therefore, it may be difficult for a speaker of a classifier language to make number distinctions, which shows as erroneously formed plurals in the English produced by Japanese learners [Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008, p. 138].
A study by Yoon (1993) suggests there is a significant difference in the perception of noun countability between Japanese learners of English and native speakers of English, which seems to support the conceptual nature of transfer. The study was based on the observation that grammatical descriptions of Japanese nouns ignore the distinction between count and noncount nouns, and in number marking, attention is paid to the shape, size or nature of the object.
5. Experiment
Noun phrases consisting of just a bare noun without any functional elements such as determiners, classifiers, or number morphemes are neither singular nor plural. That is why they are called “neutral” or “unspecified” for number. This property of Japanese bare nouns is called General Number in the literature (Corbett, 2000; see also Gil, 1987, Chierchia, 1998; Rullmann & You, 2006).
To test how Japanese EFL learners perceive the meaning of English bare plurals, the author conducted an experiment [Tretiakova, 2020].
As for the method of the experiment, Truth-Value Judgement Task was used (Crain & McKee, 1985; Crain & Thornton, 1998; Slabakova, 2012). Participants were 44 adults, all native speakers of Japanese with intermediate level of English. The mean age of the participants was 20 years old.
The experiment had 2x2 factorial design, where the factors were NP type and Context. The first factor gives two types of test sentences; one involves Bare Plural NPs (abbreviated BP) and the other Numeral NPs (abbreviated Num). A sample pair is given below.
a. BP-statement: Elephant has houses.
b. Num-statement: Elephant has four houses.
The other factor concerns contexts in which the test sentences are uttered. In one context, the relevant character ends up having a single object (e.g., a house) at the end of a story; and in the other context, the same character ends up having four objects (e.g., four houses). The former context is abbreviated SO (single object) while the latter MO (multiple object). Thus, every participant experienced four conditions as summarized in Table 1. The statements for each condition were given by a puppet.
Table 1. Simplified storyline and the puppet’s statement for each condition
|
| SO (Single Object) | MO (Multiple Object) |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| BP (Bare Plural) | Puppet: “Elephant has houses now. Giraffe also has houses.” | Puppet: “Elephant has houses now. Giraffe also has houses.” |
| Num (Numeral) | Puppet: “Elephant has three houses now. Giraffe has four houses.” | Puppet: “Elephant has three houses now. Giraffe has four houses.” |
There were eight item sets each of which consists of the four conditions, i.e. the BP/SO, BP/MO, Num/SO, and Num/MO conditions, which gave 32 statement-context pairs in total. These 32 pairs were distributed according to a Latin Square design such that each participant experienced two trials per condition.
The group of participants listened to each story presented by the experimenter with pictures shown on the computer screen, and the puppet described what had happened in the story when it ended (this is the test sentence). After hearing the puppet’s statement, the participants were asked to judge whether the statement was correct.
To illustrate the procedure of the experiment better, there are sample pictures below (Single Object context):
The participants accurately responded to the test sentences 68.1% of the time in the BP/SO condition and 96.5% of the time in the BP/MO condition. The participants accurately responded to test statements 98.8% of the time in the Num/SO condition and 93.1% in the Num/MO condition.
The results of the experiment suggest that the Japanese EFL learners often failed to detect the plural-only readings of bare plural sentences, while they did not have any difficulties with comprehension of numeral sentences. As expected, the participants had more troubles responding accurately to BP/SO condition in comparison to the others.
Intermediate learners like those that the author tested might interpret English bare plurals in such a way that they interpret Japanese bare nouns. Since Japanese bare nouns do not allow a plural-only reading, it explains our participants’ performance with English plural nouns.
6. Discussion
When an English speaker wants to mention objects of a certain type, he automatically considers their quantity (one or more) and encodes this information along with the word-form that best denotes the objects to which he wants to refer [Charters & Dao & Jansen, 2012]. For example, when talking about several books, the English speaker would have to use a lexical concept BOOK, to which, in this instance, a plural value must be added. In this situation the concept of plurality is activated together with the BOOK concept. In Japanese, however, hon (book/s) can mean ‘a book’ and ‘books’ at the same time (as we mentioned before, this phenomena is called General number). Thus, when Japanese EFL learners perceive English bare plurals, they assign the Japanese concept to them, which is the reason why they judged the sentences like ‘Elephant has houses now’ to be true even though Elephant in that story had only one house. However, they did not seem to have any problems with sentences including numerals in the author’s experiment.
Out of the theories mentioned above the Failed Functional Feature Hypothesis does not seem to work here because it states that some morphemes are completely inaccessible to L2, and it was not the case in our experiment. Full access/Full transfer hypothesis, as well as Shallow Structure Hypothesis, also refer to linguistic type of transfer; however, we think that the behavior of the participants can be best explained by the conceptual transfer. In Japanese the concept of plurality is set to have a noun and a number marker, either with a numeral and unit or a kanji suffix. Japanese EFL learners then take that concept and apply it to English, meaning that in their mind a numeral would be necessary for noun plurality to be understood as such. That is why many of them did not grasp the meaning of the bare plurals, because for Japanese speakers plurality would be shown by adding classifiers or other words.
7. Conclusion
Japanese bare noun phrases are said to have General Number, which means they are neither singular nor plural. To test how Japanese EFL learners perceive the meaning of English bare plurals, the author conducted an experiment with native Japanese speakers. The participants had more troubles with bare plurals rather than the sentences with numerals. The reason for such behavior was that the Japanese learners apply the concept of number of Japanese to the L2 nouns. Thus, the hypothesis of the paper that Japanese speakers’ difficulties in noun countability are caused by conceptual transfer, appears to be correct.
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