Learning Japanese as a Second Language: A Processability Perspect ...

of these studies has been mostly inductive, examining the developmental sequence of a particular linguistic aspect from detailed analysis and description of the data and providing possible explanations for the perceived acquisitional sequence. For example, Nagatomo (1991) proposed a systematic variation model out of his research on the acquisition of the Japanese particles -ga (NOM[inative]) and -wa (TOP[ic]). However, it is rare to reach the point of establishing a model from ‘inductive’ studies (Nagatomo, 2002). This is because most merely describe the data and provide plausible explanations for only a limited range of acquisitional phenomena. They provide evidence supporting a developmental path for acquiring particular syntactic/morphological structures, but seem to lack generalisability and predictability. Also, when their explanations are made on an ad hoc basis, it is difficult to apply them to other structures or across languages or to predicting acquisitional sequences of syntactic/morphological phenomena. In fact, most such studies have focused on the acquisition of a particular grammatical phenomenon, and it is, therefore, difficult to grasp through them the whole picture of Japanese L2 acquisition, as pointed out by Mine (2002). By contrast, one of the strong points of PT is its extensibility and predictive power. Thus, this research attempts to bridge the gap in understanding of the acquisition of Japanese L2.

The book is organised as follows. After the introduction, chapter 2 reviews the literature and outlines the study’s theoretical background. The first section of chapter 2 provides a brief historical sketch of past SLA studies, traversing contrastive analysis hypothesis (a behaviourist view of language acquisition) and error analysis (a nativist view), followed by the creative constructionist views of language acquisition, morpheme studies (Dulay & Burt, 1973, 1974), and monitor theory (Krashen, 1978, 1982, 1985), then the multidimensional model (Clahsen, Meisel, & Pienemann, 1983; Meisel, Clahsen, & Pienemann, 1981; Pienemann, 1980) and its further development as predictive framework (Pienemann & Johnston, 1985, 1987a, 1987b). This section aims to show the cumulative nature of insights gained from work in the last several decades in SLA research. The framework theory for this study, PT, is presented