Lexical mapping in processability theory : a case study in Japanese

The impact of the interplay between principles of discourse information and linguistic structure in the learner's system is one of the central issues in recent studies in second language acquisition (SLA) (eg. Dimroth and Starren 2003). This chapter aims to introduce the Unmarked Alignment Hypothesis and the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis in current extensions of Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998 Pienemann; Di Biase and Kawagushi 2005) and presents a preliminary empirical study from Japanese as a second language (JSL) in order to support these hypotheses. The two hypotheses are designed to explain second language development of argument-function mapping at the Syntactic-Pragmatic interface. I will show how the Lexical Mapping Theory (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989; Bresnan 2001, Dalrymple 2001) within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG; Bresnan 2001) contributes to explaining this interface, using Japanese as an example.