THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH BY A JAPANESE-SPEAKING CHILD: WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON THE ACQUISITION OF THE VA SEQUENCE AND THE PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE

摘要

A longitudinal case study was conducted in Britain on early English syntactic development of a young Japanese-speaking chilld. It was revealed that his English acquisition was markedly different from English-speaking children. The comparison of utterance types revealed that his VO and VA-type utterances were infrequent and restricted. The emergence order of his utterance types was noticeably different. Although the instances ware few, he produced utterances with word-order reversal (i.e. OV and AV sequences), with the sibilant sound attached to Object and Adverbial (Yamada-Yamamoto 1993 and 1994). His preposition + NP combinations also lacked productivity. In addition, he sometimes produced instances with word-order reversal (e.g. you for big (= "A big one for you")). Further, unlike English-speaking children, he did not produce utterances with prepositions being omitted. The lack of productivity, together with word-order reversal, for both VA and Preposition + NP sequences, suggested that this child initially lacked grammaticcal control over VA and/or Prep + NP word orders in English. This suggestions was verified by the experiment based on the Derbyshire Language Scheme (Knowles % Masidlover 1982). The above-mentioned unusual aspect of this child's early English speech was explained from the typological differences between English and Japanese: Japanese is a typical head-final language; English, on the other hand, is a good example of a head-initial language (e.g.Comrie 1981). The scarcity in the production of both VA and AV sequences, as well as both Prep + NP sequences, suggests that this child initially avoided word combinations involving 'V' and 'A' and 'Prep' and 'NP'. The Japanese language influenced, therefore, only as a default, and it worked as a basic principle for him, unless he overruled it by the English principle, such as VA and Prep + NP, which he fradually acquired in due course.