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The Second Language ( L2 ) Learners

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The second language(L2) learners often struggle to identify possible grammars in their second languages. In particular, they fail to form a sentence with an appropriate functional morpheme (Lardiere, 1998; White, 2003). A functional morpheme refers to a morpheme which performs some kind of grammatical function, playing a role in lexical change. It consists of the function words in the language such as definite markers. The inflection of a definite marker, in other words, definiteness, distinguishes a nominal phrase (NP) between identifiable and non-identifiable. That is, whether or not, a referent is identifiable or previously introduced in the discourse. In addition to identifiability, definiteness is expected to incorporate other notion, …show more content…

This paper mostly analyzes the issue of cross linguistic variation of definiteness with sample data and examples from English and Japanese.
Dryer (2013) classifies definiteness into five categories. The first type is the languages in which definite article are independent, and are distinct from demonstrative words. This type is used commonly in Western-European, Oceanic and Mesoamerican languages (Dryer, 2013; Schroeder, 2006). English is categorized in this type of languages.
In English, the grammatical element is encoded with regard to a contrast between a definite article the, and indefinite articles a/an in the language. The type of noun (count versus mass) is also a factor: indefinite mass nouns and indefinite plural countable nouns can appear without articles, i.e. as bare nouns. Furthermore, other determiners in English are consist of demonstratives, possessives, quantifiers, and cardinal numbers, some of which are definite and indefinite. The distribution of articles in English is presented in (1). Examples involving singular count nouns are illustrated in (2). Note that these singular count nouns cannot be bare, as illustrated in (2e).
(1) the: definite count nouns (singular and plural), definite mass nouns e.g. the cat, the cats, the clothing a: indefinite singular count nouns
e.g. a cat, *a cats, *a clothing
∅: indefinite plural

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