Universal Grammar and the Acquisition of Japanese Syntax

Within the framework of generative grammar, knowledge of our native language is assumed to be acquired through the interaction between biologically predetermined UG and the linguistic experience children take in after birth. If this acquisitional scenario is on the right track, we can expect that the core portion of the grammar is acquired fairly early, since the innate UG constrains the course of acquisition from the beginning of life and hence children do not have to learn much from the experience. In this chapter, we review several studies on the acquisition of Japanese that directly evaluate the validity of this acquisitional scenario. Since Japanese has various syntactic characteristics that are not observed in Germanic or Romance languages, the investigation of its acquisition process can be especially valuable to determine the plausibility of the above scenario. The properties discussed in this chapter include: basic word order, scrambling, passive, wh-in-situ and its constraints, the anaphoric use of zibun, and structure dependence.