English and Japanese Demonstratives: A Contrastive Analysis of Second Language Acquisition
[Article]
Niimura, Tomomi; Hayashi, Brenda
As seemingly simple and straightforward constructions, demonstratives are taught to foreign language learners at a rather early stage in their language instruction. For native speakers of Japanese, English ''this'' and ''that'' seem fairly easy to acquire, just as the Japanese demonstratives ko, so, and a seem like unproblematic constructions for native speakers of English. However, language teachers often find that even fairly advanced learners of Japanese or English have trouble with many of the less transparent issues surrounding demonstrative usage.