본문 바로가기
  • Home

A Study on a Method for Teaching Indefinite Nouns -Based on Surveys of the Actual Status of Learners’ Use of Indefinite Nouns and their Recognition-

Chang, Hee-ju 1

1한국외국어대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In this article, I aim to propose an effective method for teaching indefinite nouns based on a survey of the learners’ unnatural uses of human-denoting indefinite nouns. Human-denoting indefinite nouns have hardly been described in previous language studies and grammar books, and the learners of Japanese occasionally do not even recognize their meaning. First, I surveyed the actual status of the learners’ use of indefinite nouns based on composition data to see how the teachers should teach indefinite nouns to the learners. The results indicate that the indefinite nouns do not frequently appear in the composition data, but I found several unnatural usage-patterns. Based on this result, I conducted a survey about the use of human-denoting indefinite nouns with 32 participants and found that several Korean learners of Japanese do not sufficiently recognize the correct use of indefinite nouns. Second, I explored how indefinite nouns are used in novels to propose an effective method for teaching indefinite nouns. The results show that the most frequently used type is daremo, followed by darenimo, daredemo, daremoga, dareyorimo, and darenidemo. Furthermore, each type of indefinite noun co-occurs with predicates featuring some specific morphological properties. Based on these results, I compared daredemo and daremoga in the positive-polarity contexts. I also revealed that the indefinite nouns involving a particle co-occur with certain types of predicates and uncovered meaning associated with the particle for each indefinite noun. These findings are reflected in my proposed teaching method. That is, I propose that the teachers should teach the following: the human-denoting indefinite nouns, daremo and darenimo, co-occur with negative predicates, whereas daredemo, daremoga, and darenidemo co-occur with positive predicates.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.