According to Talmy’s typology of “lexicalization patterns” for a motion event, English is the type of language that conflates Motion and Manner in the verb root, whereas Japanese is the type of language that conflates Motion and Path in the verb root. This article provides an explanation for why there is such a difference between English and Japanese within the framework of Hale and Keyser’s syntactic approach to argument structure. It extends Hale and Keyser’s approach to motion verbs and locational/directional Ps in English and Japanese and shows that given a “Lexical Relational Structure” of a motion event, the difference between English and Japanese derives from the fact that the former has a variety of directional Ps, allowing the insertion of a manner-of-motion verb into the Motion V, whereas the latter has a variety of directed motion verbs with the Path P incorporated into the Motion V. This suggests that Talmy’s lexicalization patterns are constrained by general syntactic principles.

This paper investigates Japanese speakers’ acquisition of the mass–count distinction in English. Learners judge whether two large objects/portions of stuff are more than six tiny objects/portions of stuff or vice versa. Results show that learners correctly base judgments on number for count nouns (judging that six small cups are more cups than two large cups) and object-mass nouns (e.g., furniture) and on volume for substance-mass nouns (judging that two large portions of mustard are more mustard than six tiny portions of it). For nouns that can be either mass or count in English (e.g., string(s)) or cross-linguistically (e.g., “spinach”), learners fail to shift judgments according to the mass–count syntax in which the words appear. Results suggest that Japanese learners have difficulty using mass–count syntactic cues to disambiguate the meanings and thus fail to acquire the mass–count distinction in English.

In English, manner-of-motion verbs (walk, run) and directed motionverbs (go) can appear with a prepositional phrase that expresses a goal (goal PP) as in John walked (ran, went) to school. In contrast, Japanese allows only directed motionverbs to occur with a goal PP. Thus, English allows a wider range of motion verbs to occur withgoal PPs than Japanese does. Learnability considerations, then, lead me to hypothesize thatJapanese learners will learn manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs in English from positiveevidence, whereas English learners will have difficulty learning that manner-of-motion verbs withgoal PPs are impossible in Japanese because nothing in the input will tell them so. Forty-twointermediate Japanese learners of English and 21 advanced English learners of Japanese weretested using a grammaticality judgment task with pictures. Results support this prediction andprovide a new piece of evidence for the previous findings indicating that L1 influence persistswhen an argument structure in the L2 constitutes a subset of its counterpart in the L1.