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Paper short abstract:

Japanese retellings of two short, wordless comic strips by learners of various linguistic backgrounds are compared with those of native speakers, with attention to differences in benefactive expressions between the two comic strips, in speaking versus writing, and between natives and learners.

Paper long abstract:

Verbal auxiliaries of "giving" and "receiving" (benefactive expressions) in Japanese are built from three verbs "ageru", "kureru", and "morau", a structure rarely seen in other languages (Yamada 2004). Previous studies on storytelling in the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS) have compared differences in vocabulary and grammar between native speakers and learners (Okuno & Dianni 2015, Konishi 2017, Mitani et al. 2017), but none has analyzed benefactive expressions at the level of discourse, relying instead on fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice, and sentence completion tests (Sakamoto & Okada 1996, Han 2005, Takemura 2011), not storytelling, and the subjects' native languages are also limited. Using I-JAS, I compare Japanese-language retellings of two short, wordless comic strips, by learners who are native speakers of English, Chinese, Korean, and French (50 subjects per languag e: 200 total) with those of native Japanese speakers (50 subjects). I examine differences in usage of benefactive expressions (1) between the two comic strips, (2) in oral versus written storytelling, and (3) between native speakers and learners. Benefactive expressions were rarely used to tell the first story, even by native speakers, whereas for story two they were used in approximately half of native speakers' discourse. More benefactive expressions were used in writing than in speaking by both learners and native speakers. Native speakers of English and French both used benefactive expressions 10% as often as native speakers of Japanese, compared to Korean natives' 30% and Chinese natives' 35%. Native speakers often used "-te-kureru" on the verbs "okiru" and "kizuku", but learners rarely did so. Similarly, "-te-morau" was often added to "akeru" by native speakers, but seldom by learners. Meanwhile, some learners used "-te-ageru", which was not used by native speakers here at all. Accordingly, even advanced learners (JLPT N1) seem, with interesting national differences, not to be learning to use benefactive expressions in discourse the way native speakers do.