日語攪拌規律的習得

On the Acquisition of Scrambling in Japanese

本文以實驗的方法研究日語攪拌規律的習得。日語的語序自由，同時允許SOV與OSV語序。Harada(1977)，Saito(1985)與一些學者都主張日語的基礎語序是SOV，OSV語序是由賓語移前衍生。我們首先指出兒童早在兩歲即能夠理解攪拌句，接著證明這些兒童具有攪拌規律語法特性的正確知識。我們使用帶有照應詞“zibun”的句子來測試兒童對攪拌的重構特性的知識。結果顯示，那些能理解簡單攪拌句、並且能理解非攪拌主動句中“zibun”的兒童同時也能理解含有“zibun”的攪拌句。這說明兒童在很小的年紀就能夠理解簡單攪拌句，並且知道攪拌規律移位的性質。

This paper presents an experimental study of the acquisition of Japanese scrambling. Japanese is a free word-order language, and allows both the subjectobject-verb order and the object-subject-verb order. Harada (1977) and Saito (1985), among others, have proposed that the former is the basic order and that the latter is derived by movement of the object. We first show that children understand scrambled sentences much earlier then generally assumed, even at age 2. Then, we present evidence that those children actually have proper knowledge of the syntactic properties of scrambling. We used sentences with the anaphor zibun to test children’s knowledge of the reconstruction property of scrambling. Our results show that those who were successful with the interpretation of simple scrambled sentences and the interpretation of zibun in active non-scrambled sentences showed perfect performance with scrambled sentences containing zibun. This suggests that children not only can properly interpret simple scrambled sentences, but actually know the properties of scrambling as a movement operation from a very early age.