In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent…

While acquiring a second language, learners may encounter challenges and difficulties in effectively carrying out verbal communication in the second language. Mastering the apology speech act is a challenge for L2 learners. The objective of this study is to identify the apology strategies utilized by individuals learning the Japanese language, as…

This study aims to analyze the use of tense and aspect in academic writing in engineering with a major focus on the use of simple past and present perfect. In general, one of the most difficult items for Japanese EFL learners is the appropriate use of tense and aspect. The previous literature pointed out that ESL learners are often confused about…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

Case marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs…

Percentages of unexpected pronominal usage in Japanese are listed. Data was gathered from Japanese magazine articles concerning individuals. Tendencies rather than strict rules became evident. (SC)

The principal claim of this paper is that the Japanese passive consists of two different constructions, each derived from a distinct deep structure and each having associated with it a distinct set of syntactic and semantic properties. One of these constructions, the "adversative passive," implies that the grammatical subject of the…

Discusses the ellipsis of major sentential elements as a pervasive grammatical phenomenon in Japanese conversation and demonstrates its relevance for current theories of discourse or text analysis. (FL)

States the differences between the classes of structures that admit a progressive interpretation in English and Japanese and discusses progressive aspect in these two languages on the basis of proposed universally valid definitions. It is concluded that the contrastive behavior of the English "be-ing" construction and the Japanese…

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

This reference grammar of Japanese is divided into thirty-one major sections: (1) notational conventions, including spelling, punctuation, accent, and juncture; (2) sentence construction: nuclear sentences and expanded sentences; (3) predicate adjuncts; (4) expansion constraints and noun subcategorization; (5) voice conversions; (6) nuclear focus…

The frequency with which a child's parents use a given linguistic form has been considered influential in language development. This hypothesis has been challenged, however, notably by Ervin (1964) and Brown (1973). The frequency hypothesis makes the assumptions that: (1) children are not selective in what they attend to, (2) they listen to most…

The report is a frequency analysis of vocabulary and sentence patterns in the Japanese language. The corpora used are a media sample, a discussion session, elicited sentences, and words elicited for frame sentences. The outputs are the following frequency tables: (1) semantic frequency of combined corpus (media, discussion, elicited sentences)…

A volume combining two special issues of "Papers in Linguistics" contains 10 papers concerning Japanese language use and 12 concerning languages of the U.S.S.R. The papers on Japanese include: "Intrusion in Japanese Conversation,""Japanese Use of English Loans,""Some Discourse Principles and Lengthy Sentences in…

This paper explores the implications of presumed language universals and language particulars for second language teaching and learning. It is felt that an awareness of the universal features of language design builds confidence in the student who can concentrate on features which distinguish the target language from the native language. Examples…