A comparative study of clause combining strategies by Chinese L1 Japanese learners and Japanese native speakers

Abstract

The primary purpose of the present study is to compare the clause combining strategies used by Chinese L1 Japanese speakers and native Japanese speakers speaking Japanese. This study used storytelling data from the corpus I-JAS and involved both quantitative and qualitative analyses to identify clause combining forms used by each group, followed by a comparison between the forms (e.g., soshite ‘and/then’, -toki ‘when’, -to ‘when/if’) that clearly distinguished the native and learner groups. A relatively clear pattern emerged in which Japanese native speakers were inclined to use conjunctives; the Chinese speakers preferred conjunctives but that preference was not as strong as in the Japanese group. Forms such as conjunctive -te ‘and/then’ were similarly used by both groups, although the Chinese group preferred the conjunction soshite ‘and/then’ and the conjunctive -toki ‘when’. Of all the clause combining forms, the one that markedly distinguished native and learner groups was the conjunctive -to ‘when/if’, which was used by the vast majority of the native speakers, but not by the Chinese learners. It was also found to be used by native speakers in a specific context in which the first clause sets the frame for the discovery of a surprise event/action/change of state that occurs in the second clause; this use requires a certain level of Japanese language proficiency which seems to account for the less frequent use of -to by most Chinese L1 Japanese learners.