The acquisition of the meanings and uses of the past form -ta by first and second language learners of Japanese

This thesis investigates the acquisition of the meaning and uses of the Japanese past form -ta by L1 and L2 learners of Japanese, and describes differences observed in the paths followed by L1 and L2 learners in acquiring the form. Most of the previous studies conducted on the acquisition of temporal marking in Japanese have focussed on validating the Aspectual Hypothesis, and have shown that the process of acquisition of temporal markers in Japanese is a function of the aspectual class of the predicate. This thesis proposes a more fine-grained examination of the acquisition of tense and aspect in Japanese that goes beyond the hypothesis. The L1 and L2 acquisition data used in this study is considered against the background of a unified representation of the Japanese past form analysed as topic time in posttime of the time of situation based on Klein's analysis (Klein 2000). Both L1 and L2 studies reported here were conducted by using conversation data and experimental data. The conversation data provides an overview for the description of the path of the acquisition of past form based on the unified representation proposed. Then, experimental studies were conducted for more detailed investigations under controlled settings. It is shown that L1 Japanese learners initially use the past form in a hot news interpretation, and only later develop remote past and post-phase uses. Children begin by learning to use the past form by using the Stative verb aru very frequently, and subsequently generalise those uses to a wider range of contexts in the direction of adult usage by allocating the past form to "directly identifiable" items, which are visually tangible and identified by a speaker as an individual instance at TU. Two experiments show that 3-, 4-, 5-year olds children have difficulties when the correct use of the past requires a rather sophisticated pragmatic analysis of the situation in the absence of explicit contextual information. By contrast, L2 learners