Acquisition of Semantic and Pragmatic Meaning of the Quantifier Nanko-ka by Adult Learners of Japanese

Abstract

This study investigated how the Japanese quantifier nanko-ka, which is one of the counterparts of English some, is interpreted by adult learners of Japanese. English some 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 some more pragmatically than native speakers of English. However, it has not investigated yet whether the Japanese some has two different interpretations as well. Additionally, Japanese some, nanko-ka, is morphologically more complicated than English some, 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 some, 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 some, and another additional task for the natives examined whether Japanese some, nanko-ka has two different interpretations like English some. The results showed that the learners tend not to have intuitiveness to associate nanko-ka with some 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 some, nanko-ka seems not to be interpreted in a same way as the English some 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 some by not only learners of Japanese but also native speakers of Japanese.