Grammatical development in learners of Japanese as a second language

This paper aims to further develop the application of Processability Theory (PT) to Japanese originally proposed by Pienemann (1998, pp207-214) with further empirical contributions by Kawaguchi (2000). Pienemann's early application to Japanese identified three levels in the acquisition of verbal morphology and were related to the general processability hierarchy. These are: (Levell) no affix; (Level 2) lexical affix ("Vaff'", affixation of a morpheme to the verbal stem); and (Level 3) phrasal affixes ("V-te V", with the verb marked by '-te' in penultimate position): Kawaguchi (2000), following Pienemano, also focused on verbal morphology and attempted to develop Pienemann' s application. Although the developmental sequence of L2 Japanese verbal morphology has been hypothesised and empirically tested, the acquisition of L2 Japanese syntax within the framework of PT has not been investigated so far. Here I will extend the PT hypotheses for Japanese L2 not only in relation to verbal morphology but also to word order phenomena and the concomitant marking of grammatical functions through postpositional particles. Table 1 summarily introduces the hypothetical hierarchy of processing procedures as applied to the acquisition of Japanese. This will provide a framework for discussing key elements of Japanese word order phenomena first, then verbal morphology. In this paper, a brief typological characterisation of Japanese is presented first. This is followed by discussion of word order and morphosyntax issues, where a hypothesis of developmental stages of Japanese L2 is developed within the general PT framework. A cross-sectional study of L2 Japanese learners' speech production is examined against the hypothesised developmental stages. Further, the validity of the application of PT to L2 Japanese is discussed. In the last part some implications for teaching Japanese L2 are presented.