The overgeneration of Spanish articles: A view from Japanese
How do students acquire the article system of their target language when it
doesn’t exist in their mother tongue? In this presentation, we will examine the errors
made by Japanese students who have studied Spanish for two years as their university
major.
It is well known that Japanese is one of the languages that have no articles.
Hence Japanese students have struggled with trying to acquire them (Shirahata (1988),
Ito (2012), Nishikawa (2006), among others). Moreover, the acquisition of the article
system does not proceed uniformly. As noted by Nishikawa (2006), for Japanese
students, the most difficult usage of articles is the generic interpretation with zero
articles.
To express genericity of the NP, Spanish has several options. In the subject
position, the article must be present in (1a-c) (except in some idiomatic expressions
(1d)). In the object position bare singular and plural objects can appear (2a-c). The most
frequent errors of Japanese students are putting the indefinite article in (2a), and the
definite article in (2b-c).
Following Ishikawa (2007), we assume the structure of Spanish nominals as in
(3). Here, Spanish D selects a functional projection (AgrP), and checks [±R(erefential)].
AgrP hosts the feature [±P(artitive)], and Affix Phrase hosts [Number] and [Gender]
features, respectively. On the other hand, we assume Japanese nominal structure as in
(4). If the Romance nouns are subject to head-movement (N-movement) within DP
(Longobardi 1994, Cinque 1994, among others), bare singular/plural nouns are subject
to head-movement within DP to check their features without realizing an overt D. The
data in (2) shows that although Japanese students acquire the DP structure and
feature-checking with overt D at early stage, the acquisition of N-movement takes time.
Therefore Japanese students demonstrate an overgeneration of the articles with generic
interpretation.
(1) a. La gallina no es tan tonta como parece.
b. Una secretaria tiene que saber escribir a máquina.
c. *Toro viene corriendo.
d. Perro que ladra no muerde.
e. ??Perros que ladran no muerde.
(2) a. Tenemos {φ/*un}coche, pero no lo usamos.
b. Me gustar leer {φ/*los}libros.
c. Mi trabajo es reparar {φ/*los}coches estropeados.
(3) [DP D0 … Agr0 … Aff0 …N0 …]
(Ishikawa 1997:558)
0
0
(4) [DP D … N …]
Selected references:
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1994. “On the Evidence for Partial N-Movement in the Romance
DP.” Path towards Universal Grammar: Studies in Honor of Richard S. Kayne.
Eds. G. Cinque, et al. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP. 85-110
Ishikawa, Masataka. 2007. “Feature checking, Chain Linking, and the Distribution of
Noun Phrases in Spanish.” Hispania 80 (3):556-568
Ito, Mitsu. 2012. “Eigo gakusyuusya no era ni tuite.” Kyouyou kennkyuu 18(3): 23-42
Nishikawa, Takashi. 2006. “Spein-go no kanshi shiyouni okeru mondaiten.” Koubeshi
gaidai ronsou 57(7): 21-40
Longobardi, Giuseppe. 1994. “Reference and Proper Names: A Theory of N-Movement
in Syntax and Logical Form.”Linguistic Inquiry 25:609-665
Shirahata, Tomohiko. 1988. “The learning order of English grammatical morphemes by
Japanese high school students.” JASET Bulletin 19:83-102