日本人英語学習者の中間言語の類型学的視点からの分析

概要

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Japanese is basically a topic-prominent language whereas English is a subject-prominent language. Because of this typological difference between the two languages, Japanese EFL learners seem to frequently transfer the topic-comment structure of their native language when producing English. This paper is an attempt to investigate whether Japanese EFL learners' interlanguage will progress from a topic-comment form to a subject-predicate form as their English proficiency improves. The focus is mainly on two syntactic properties: dummy or empty subjects ('it' and 'there') and subject-verb agreement, which are both regarded as basic characteristics of a subject-prominent language like English. The underlying question of this paper is whether Japanese EFL learners, instead of relying on the topic-comment structure, will more frequently produce sentences with dummy-subjects and correctly inflected verbs as they increase their English proficiency levels. To elicit data, a written translation task was given to Japanese EFL learners. Data produced by learners of different proficiency levels was analyzed in terms of their use of dummy subjects, subject-verb agreement, and topic-comment form.
全国英語教育学会の論文