This study examined the acquisition of the Japanese errand construction by English-speaking Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) learners. The errand construction is an expression that describes a motion event in which a subject of motion goes elsewhere, does a certain activity, and comes back. The English errand constructions employ two verbs, ‘go’ and ‘do (an activity),’ or only one verb, ‘do (an activity).’ Japanese also takes two verbs to describe an errand motion event; however, the verbs that Japanese uses are different – ‘do (an activity) and come (back).’
From my teaching experience in the Japanese program at The Ohio State University and the results of Inagaki’s study (2001) that investigates the acquisition of motion verbs with goal prepositional/postpositional phrases by English-speaking Japanese as a foreign languages (JFL) learners, I supposed that difficulties are likely to be observed in the case of English-speaking JFL learner’s acquisition of the Japanese errand construction. Although JFL learners are aware of the correct Japanese errand construction, such as Pen-o katte kimasu ‘I will buy a pen and come (back),’ they may wrongly accept Japanese sentences, such as Pen-o itte kaimasu ‘I will go and buy a pen’ and Pen-o kaimasu ‘I will buy a pen,’ as expressions of errand motion events due to an influence from English errand construction.
In order to examine English-speaking JFL learners’ acquisition of the Japanese errand construction, a written acceptability/naturalness judgment task was specifically developed for the experiment. Data were collected from 35 English-speaking JFL learners at The Japanese program at The Ohio State University and from 9 native speakers of Japanese from both on and off campus.
The results suggest that English-speaking JFL learners judge the Japanese errand construction as grammatical even at beginning levels of learning and that the acquisition of the Japanese errand construction develops generally and steadily as their proficiency increases. As a reason for this phenomenon, the effect of positive evidence is assumed to play a significant role. Nevertheless, the learners also accept the English transferred errand constructions at the same time. Despite the fact that the learners received explicit formal instructions on the difference between the English and Japanese errand constructions, they have difficulties overcoming the negative transfer problems from their first language, especially the beginning level learners. In addition to these phenomena, the learners appear to be constructing an interlanguage during the acquisition of the Japanese errand construction. Their interlanguage shows an improvement as their proficiency level increases; yet, they cannot always escape from the problems of fossilization or backsliding. As a result, they may never reach the level where they can properly use the construction consistently.