Case/Focus Interaction in Young Children's Interpretation of dake (only) in Japanese

要旨

We present children's non-adult interpretation of sentences that con- tain the focus particle dake, using the Truth-Value Judgment Task (Crain and Th ornton 1998). Our fi rst observation is that children interpreted sentences with dake diff erently when dake was attached to the subject and to the object (the subject/object asymmetry in the interpretation of dake). We also observed that children interpreted sentences with dake diff erently when dake was followed by a case particle (the 'particle/no-particle asymmetry'). Any theory based on the assumption that the Japanese employs an abstract Case feature system fails to capture the systematic pattern shown in children's non-adult interpretations of dake. Our data provide empirical support for a syntactic theory proposed in Aoyagi (2006), which distinguishes the nature of Nominative and Accusative case particles ( ga and o), as well as assumes diff erent derivations for sentences containing dake, depending on whether it is followed by a case particle or not.*

主題