The syntactic and discourse knowlege of zibun (self) among English-speaking learners of Japaneseasaforeignlanguage in the United States

This study examined the following lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic/discourse constraints of zibun 'self' among adult English-speaking Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) learners at a major Midwestern university: (1) Lexical: Zibun embedded in the idiomatic expression 'zibun-de' (by oneself) must refer to the referent of the clausemate subject noun phrase (NP). (2) Syntactic: Zibun must be bound by a subject NP. (3) Pragmatic/Discourse: Zibun which occurs in the argument position of an empathy-loaded verb must be anchored to the perspective of the individual with whom the speaker empathizes.; A written version of a truth value judgment task was given to 21 adult JFL learners who were enrolled in three different course levels (Levels 3--5), as well as 27 native speakers of Japanese who served as the control group. The results showed that JFL learners correctly accepted or rejected the test sentences taken as a group 70% of the time. With respect to the sentences that were designed specifically to investigate the lexical knowledge of zibun-de, JFL subjects across all levels made correct responses 95% of the time and achieved very high non-parametric index of sensitivity (A ') values with respect to the well-formedness of these sentences, suggesting that they possessed the proper lexical knowledge of zibun-de . As far as the syntactic constraint is concerned, the JFL subjects, particularly those in Levels 3 and 4, were far more likely to accept the local subject NPs, while rejecting the long-distance subject NPs, as the antecedent of zibun. JFL learners across all levels performed poorly on the sentences designed to examine the pragmatic/discourse constraint of zibun: their rate of accuracy for correctly accepting or rejecting the relevant test sentences was only 56%, while their A' value was .61. These findings suggest that lexical learning can take place even if subjects have only a limited understanding of the complex syntactic and pragmatic/discourse constraints of zibun.