| This study investigated how the Japanese quantifier nanko-ka , which is one of the counterparts of English nanko-ka, is interpreted by adult learners of Japanese. English nanko-ka has two distinguished meanings: a semantic meaning `a certain number of' and a pragmatic meaning `not all.' And according to Slabakova (2010), learners of English tend to interpret nanko-ka more pragmatically than native speakers of English. However, it has not investigated yet whether the Japanese nanko-ka has two different interpretations as well. Additionally, Japanese nanko-ka, nanko-ka, is morphologically more complicated than English nanko-ka, and it is not likely to be directly explained in a Japanese foreign language classroom teaching. Considering these facts, this study examined i) whether learners of Japanese can associate nanko-ka as a counterpart of English nanko-ka, and ii) if so, whether learners of Japanese can interpret nanko-ka in a native-like way. 20 advanced Japanese learners and 19 Japanese native speakers participated in this study. The main task, providing the pragmatically enriched storyboards was conducted in order to see how nanko-ka is interpreted. Besides, one additional task for the learners investigated how well learners could associate nanko-ka with nanko-ka, and another additional task for the natives examined whether Japanese nanko-ka, nanko-ka has two different interpretations like English nanko-ka. The results showed that the learners tend not to have intuitiveness to associate nanko-ka with nanko-ka without direct input of the explanation of nanko-ka as a quantifier; however, once they could associate, even learners perform the interpretation of nanko-ka in a native-like way. Another finding is that Japanese nanko-ka, nanko-ka seems not to be interpreted in a same way as the English nanko-ka in terms of its semantic interpretation in a certain context. Additionally, the nanko-ka which semantically true but pragmatically infelicitous is interpreted more ambiguous compared to the nanko-ka by not only learners of Japanese but also native speakers of Japanese. |
