• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.35-49
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• 2022

This study examines crosslinguistic influence on the use of concessive conditionals by Japanese EFL learners. Contrastive analysis suggests that Japanese native speakers may overuse the concessive conditional even if due to partial similarities to Japanese concessive conditionals, whose formal and semantic restrictions are fewer than those of English concessive conditionals. This hypothesis is tested using data from the written module of the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). Comparison of Japanese native speakers with English native speakers and Chinese native speakers reveals the following trends. First, Japanese native speakers tend to overuse concessive conditionals compared to native speakers, while similar overuse is not observed in Chinese native speaker data. Second, non-nativelike uses of even if appear in contexts allowing the use of concessive conditionals in Japanese. Third, while overuse and infelicitous use of even if is observed at all proficiency levels, formal errors are restricted to learners at lower proficiency levels. These findings suggest that crosslinguistic influence does occur in the use of concessive conditionals, and that its particular realization is affected by L2 proficiency, with formal crosslinguistic influence mediated at an earlier stage than semantic cross-linguistic influence.

• Language and Information
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.123-140
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• 2014

The aim of this paper is twofold: to identify two types of even if concessive conditionals, standing-ifs and introduced-ifs (Bennett 1982) in terms of whether the truth of the consequent is 'entailed' (the consequent-entailment problem in terms of Lycan 2001); and to analyze these two types of concessive conditionals in a compositional way. Here we argue that, following Guerzoni and Lim (2007), even if conditionals can be analyzed as the cases where even gets its focus in conditionals. We also argue that the consequent-entailment problem can be accounted for in a compositional way if we identify the focus as well as the scope of even in conditionals correctly. We further argue that the analysis presented in this paper supports the scope theory of even, among two theories of even previously proposed in various works. We also consider the possibility where concessive conditionals without even can be analyzed as an extension of the analysis proposed in this paper.