The acquisition of style shift in Japanese by korean speakers when expressing “cause” and “reason”

Abstract

This paper focuses on the acquisition of style shift competence of 4 Korean speakers through the analysis of expressions of cause and reason used in both formal and casual speeches. First, it was observed that, in a certain stage of the acquisition process, the learners built their own original style sift system as their competence in the language increased. They acquire the forms “kara”, “node” and “nde” in an accumulative way and begin to shift between them according to the situation’s formality. Also, it became clear that style shift between these three forms was due to two linguistic factors: phonetic similarity and semantic constraints. In other words, the learners tend to avoid the form of “node”, “nde”, because of its similarity with the simplified polite form “ndesu”. As for the semantic constraints, they avoid the “ndesukara(nodakara)” form because it has an implicit meaning of reproof when the speaker offers new information unknown to the hearer.