The Acquisition of Benefactives and Passives

This paper investigates children’s acquisition of benefactives and passives in Japanese. It has been pointed out that Japanese complex constructions with mora-w (receive) are acquired later than their counterparts with age-ru (give) (Uyeno et al. 1978). Also, many researchers report that passives are more difficult for children than active counterparts (Borer and Wexler 1987, Fox and Grodzinsky 1998, among others). In this paper, we first argue that benefactives and passives in Japanese share the similar syntactic properties such as movement and case-marking pattern. In particular, both mora-w (receive) benefactives and passives are derived from their age-ru (give) and active counterparts by movement which forms A-chain. Moreover, ni-phrases (by-phrases in English) both benefactives and passives contain can be replaced by kara-phrases (from-phrases) expressing source theta-role. Based on the observation, we examine the results of experiment we conducted with three native Japanese children. The results lead us to claim that the reason why mora-w (receive) benefactives and passives are difficult for children lies in the Agent marking ni-phrase (by-phrases) rather than in movement, rejecting the previous researches on both benefactives and passives.