Language Transfer and Discourse Constraint on English Dative Alternation

In English, dative position is highly constrained when it occurs with a certain given and new information distribution related to its previous discourse ('motivating'), while in other context ('un-motivating'), it is not. In Japanese, on the other hand, dative sentences do not alternate nor have discourse constraint. Therefore, it is hypothesized that Japanese learners of English as L2 find difficulty to map the distinction of given and new information onto English dative alternation. An experiment is reported which tests such a hypothesis by means of a recognition memory task for sentences in different types of contexts. In terms of the scores combined correctness and confidence rating in the memory recognition task, NSs recognized contextually motivated datives slightly better (p<0.05) than the contextually un-motivated datives ; whereas NNSs' difference between the scores of recognition tasks of datives in motivated and un-motivated context was not significant. In discussing the result of the experiment, the experimental material is re-examined in terms of reliability. It is concluded that more careful designing of experiment will be required if reliability of the findings is to be raised to acceptable levels. Also it is suggested that a sentence-bound description is inadequate to represent such facts in second language acquisition, thus unable to explain the transfer of L1 to L2.

公開日:2010年1月24日で登録したコンテンツは、国立情報学研究所において電子化したものです。