An Issei Japanese American's Interlanguage: Negation, Time Reference, and Topicalization

This article reports the findings of an analysis of an issei (first-generation)
Japanese American's English interlanguage from three perspectives: (a)
negation, (b) time reference, and (c) topicalization. A quantitative and normative
analysis of the informant's interlanguage negation has resulted in placing
him in the mid-mesolang stage of Stauble 's (1984) Japanese-English negation
continuum. A qualitative analysis of time reference showed that this mid
mesolang speaker's primary means of expressing temporality is by the use of
pragmatic devices such as time adverbials and implicit reference rather than by
relying on verb phrase morphology. The learner's use of interlanguage
topicalizations, which is argued to occur as a result of transfer from "wa
constructions" in Japanese, appeared in the form of three major syntactic
constructions: (a) NP + copula constructions, where a copula is used as a topicmarker,
(b) left-dislocation clauses with a sentence-initial topic NP and a resumptive
pronoun, and (c) other "topic + comment" constructions without
topic-marking copulas or resumptive pronouns. The findings of this case study
suggest that the two major forces which have guided this Japanese speaker in
constructing his English interlanguage system over the past years of naturalistic
acquisition in the U.S. are native language transfer and simplification.