Paper short abstract:

Psychological verbs in Japanese and Spanish show a typological contrast and their corresponding verbs seem semantically different. In this talk I will demonstrate how this typological contrast affects Japanese learning and teaching in Spanish speaking environment.

Paper long abstract:

There is a typological contrast between psych(ological) verbs of Japanese and Spanish. In Japanese, they appear in the Experiencer-Subject construction (e.g. Maki-ga kaminari-ni odoroita ‘Maki got surprised at the thunder’) and many can undergo causativization (e.g. Kaminari-ga Maki-o odorok-ase-ta ‘The thunder surprised Maki). In Spanish, on the other hand, there are reflexive psychological verbs (e.g. María se asustó por el trueno ‘María got frightened at the thunder’) that are considered results of anticausativization on causative psych verbs (e.g. El trueno asustó a María ‘The thunder frightened María’). Psych verbs in these languages are derived with procedures that reversely mirror each other.

For Spanish speaking learners, Japanese psych verbs are difficult to learn. The reason stems from that a psychological state is expressed in the Experiencer-Object construction in Spanish, whereas it is lexicalized in the Experiencer-Subject construction in Japanese (cf. Talmy 1985). What happens for them, then, when it is natural to say Watashi-wa odorita ‘I got surprised’, they would say Watashi-o odorok-ase-ta, as a literally translation from (Eso) me sorprendió ‘It surprised me’ in Spanish. This also relates to Ikegami’s (1981) distinction between “do” languages and “become” languages (Deguchi 1982 and Fukushima 1990). Nevertheless, as Noda (1997) pointed out, this is not that all verbs in a language are lexicalized in a single pattern. The question is whether the corresponding expressions between languages are semantically equal. In this talk, I highlight the semantic differences between those psych verbs in question and I demonstrate how this typological contrast affects Japanese learning and teaching in Spanish speaking environment.

References: Deguchi, A. 1982. Supeingo: saiki keishiki o megutte. In Kouza nihongo 10: Gaikokugo to no taishou I. Meiji-Shoin. 305-318. Fukushima, N. 1990. Supeingo to nihongo: Kansetsu-eikyou-hyougen no taisyou. In Kouza nihongo to nihongo kyouiku. Meiji-Shoin. 197-218. Ikegami, Y. 1981. Suru to Naru no gengogaku. Taishukan. Noda, H. 1997. Nihongo to supeingo no boisu. In Niohongo to supeingo, 2. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. 83-113. Talmy, L. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Language typology and syntactic description III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge University Press. 57-149.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation reports the results from research into the use of potential expressions in request situations, which are used by native speakers of Japanese and Japanese learners.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation reports the results of an investigation into the differences in the use of potential expressions in request situations between native speakers of Japanese and learners of Japanese.

　There are two types of possible expressions in Japanese: competence Potential expressions, which express ability, as in 'he can speak Japanese', and expressions that imply that the situation is possible, as in 'I can speak a lot of Japanese at this language salon'. Previous studies have also pointed out that expressions meaning evaluation (Ono 1993), modesty (Kato 2015) and request (Maeda 2021) are also possible. For learners of Japanese, it is not easy to make requests to others in a language other than their mother tongue. This is because requests are often not formed by the expression 'please' alone.

　Therefore, from the I-JAS corpus, focusing on expressions in request situations by native speakers of Japanese and learners of Japanese, the analysis was based on the method of Shibuya (1998).

The results of the analysis showed that, whereas native Japanese speakers tend to use 'teitadakemasuka' and 'dekireba' as preamble in request situations, European learners of Japanese tend to use 'dekiru' more often, and this tendency varies according to the level of acquisition. Furthermore, it was also observed that vocabulary not found in Japanese is produced regardless of the learner's first language. This presentation will explain the points that teachers might take note when teaching request situations.