Acquisition of L2 English Negative Quantifiers without Equivalent Lexical Items in an L1

• Authors: Masaaki Kamiya , Zhaosen Guo

Abstracts

EN

This article investigates how second language learners interpret a scope bearing item in the target language. According to Sprouse (2006), L2 learners’ task is to relabel their native language’s lexical items in line with the features of the target language. An interesting lexical item is the English negative quantifier, for which there is no equivalent in Japanese. It was discovered that the default interpretation of the English negative quantifier by Japanese-speaking learners of English was a narrow scope reading (i.e., Quantifier Raising (QR) does not occur). We follow Beghelli and Stowell’s (1997) elaborated functional structures for quantifier feature checking at Spec-Head agreement. Because Japanese is considered to be a “no agreement” language (Kuroda, 1992; Fukui & Sakai, 2003), QR is failed since the English negative quantifier cannot satisfy “agreement” for the feature-checking. Hence, even if the equivalent lexical item does not exist in Japanese, a grammatical constraint such as “no agreement” is transferred to the initial state of the second language (Full Transfer in Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996).

Keywords

EN

second language acquisition; full transfer; full access; Japanese; English; quantifiers

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
• Journal: Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 1-39

Dates

published

2024

Contributors

author

Masaaki Kamiya

• Hamilton College

• https://orcid.org/0000000249872681

author

Zhaosen Guo

• Independent scholar

• https://orcid.org/0009000712754140

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Identifiers

DOI

10.31261/TAPSLA.13029

Biblioteka Nauki

59498094