Acquisition of Zero Pronouns in Discourse by Korean and English Learners of L2 Japanese

Recent SLA studies have reported that optionality phenomena are observed even in L2 grammar at near-native or advanced levels, and those studies concluded that L2 learners have problems in syntax-discourse interface, but not on their syntactic representation (Sorace 1993, Robertson and Sorace 1999, Montul and Slabakova 2003, Hopp 2004, Sorace 2006, Sorace and Filliati 2006, Sorace 2007). One phenomenon which relates to both syntactic and discourse levels is a pronoun. So far few research studies on the use of Japanese pronominals in discourse have been identified in SLA. Hasatani (1991) examined Japanese essays written by her elementary English and French learners and found that they showed asymmetry in use of null pronouns: they dropped more subjects than objects. Does such asymmetry still exist in advanced L2 grammar? Do advanced learners show optionality where both overt and null forms are allowed to be topic-referring in topic context? The following preliminary study reports on the issue by examining the use of zero pronouns by advanced English and Korean learners of Japanese. Finally, we will discuss the results considering two accounts, a syntax-discourse interface account by Sorace (2007), and a syntactic account by Park (2004), which explain L2 learners’ selection of null/overt pronouns.