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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.