The Acquisition of Functional Categories : Data from Japanese

Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC12), 18-20 Feb, 1998, 94-105 The Acquisition of Functional Categories: Data from Japanese* Yoshie Yamashita Naruto University of Education While demonstratives and other determiner-like words in English are part of the functional system, their Japanese counterparts are simple lexical categories. The semantic theory (e.g. Brown & Fraser 1963) predicts that these elements must emerge at a later stage in both languages since they denote relatively abstract and complex meanings; whereas Radford's (1990) maturational theory makes no such predictions about Japanese. In replicating O'Grady's (1993) Korean study, I collected both production and comprehension data for Japanese. The data indicates that despite their categorial status (i.e. lexical categories), these determiner-like elements emerge quite late. Since the late emergence of these elements in both Japanese and English can be attributed to their relatively abstract semantics, there is no reason to attribute the late acquisition of English determiners to their categorial status (i.e. functional categories). Thus, just like O'Grady's Korean data, the Japanese data seems to support the semantic theory. 1. Introduction Radford (1990) has proposed a theory of language acquisition that makes crucial use of the distinction between lexical and functional categories (e.g. Fukui 1986). The central claim is that there are three distinct stages of development. Table 1 summarizes the three stages and their characterization (taken from O'Grady 1993: 1). Table 1. Three stages of syntactic development Stage� precategorial�Characterization one-word utterances, no categorial structure 2� lexical (20 mos., ±20%)� system of lexical categories and phrases 3� functional (24 mos., ±20%) system of functional categories As indicated in Table 1, Radford's theory implies a developmental gap between the second and the third stages with a specific age difference. Providing data from English acquisition, Radford indicates that the lexical system indeed emerges before the functional system.' He further argues that the timing difference between the acquisition of the lexical system and the functional system is determined by different biologically determined stages of 'maturation' of Universal Grammar (UG). If this timing difference is determined by UG, every language should show the same timing difference in child acquisition data, since this difference in timing is genetically determined. O'Grady (1993) has challenged Radford's maturational theory based on the comparative study of determiner-like words in Korean and English. The rational for this comparison lies in the assumption that whereas demonstratives and other determiner-like words in English (the, a, this, some, etc.) are part of the functional system, their Korean counterparts are simple lexical categories (ibid.: 7).2 A second key point in his study is that the UG-based maturational theory put forward by Radford was examined side by side with the semantic theory, which states that words which have rather abstract and complex meanings (regardless of their categorial status) are acquired relatively late (cf. Brown & Fraser 1963, Brown 1973). Thus, these two theories make different predictions about the emergence of demonstratives and other determiner-like elements in Korean and English. The semantic theory predicts that these elements must emerge at a later stage in both …

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