The Acquisition of Postpositional Particles Functioning as Conjunctions by Korean Learners of Japanese

Abstract

This paper analyzes the use of “te”, “kara”, “kedo” in Japanese found in the formal speech of 4 Korean learners living in Osaka, Japan. The data was collected through a longitudinal research where each subject was interviewed 3 times. It consists of 12 speeches with a total of 8 hours. The analysis from the grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse points of view showed the following results. The learners first acquire the forms which have several different uses based on the autonomy of the sentence. From the sociolinguistic point of view, it was noticed that the learners acquire the “keredomo” and “node” perceived as formal style forms, but they tend to use the new form “nde” and not “node” because of semantic constraint. As for the speech, in the case of the utterances finished with postpositional particles, the learners acquire the use of those particles which mark the consideration of interpersonal relations. This research shows that grammatical competence is closely related to sociolinguistic and discourse competence and that the learners' language competence should be analyzed from a holistic point of view.