Acquisition and Attrition of Conditional Expressions in Imperial Japanese Used in Documents of Diary From Japanese Generation Employed Post-Elementary Education During the Colonial Period

This paper examines the characteristics of the conditional expressions ‘TO, TARA, BA, NARA’ used during language acquisition. It draws on examples from Imperial Japanese texts found in diary materials recorded by individuals of the Japanese generation who were employed after completing primary school in the unique language environment of the Japanese colonial period. These examples are compared with discourse materials collected over 70 years later from the same generation, who had since lost contact with the Japanese language. This comparison considers the longitudinal mechanisms involved in the acquisition and attrition of Japanese conditional expressions. The analysis, focusing on learner strategies and linguistic and extralinguistic factors, yields the following findings:<br/> (a) During the acquisition period, the Japanese generation&quots conditional expressions were mostly used correctly and appropriately in the diary materials. However, after contact with the Japanese language was interrupted, these expressions gradually regressed during the attrition process.<br/> (b) Comparison of the diary materials from the acquisition period with discourse materials from the attrition period shows that the initially broad use of conditional forms increasingly converged towards the TARA form.<br/> (c) The use of ‘TO, BA, NARA’ decreased or disappeared entirely, making it difficult to maintain the essential usages of these conditional expressions learned during the acquisition period.<br/> (d) In the attrition period, discourse materials reveal frequent errors, including speaker perspective errors, confusion over sentence-final modality and tense, verb conjugation errors, the acquisition and maintenance of dialectal forms due to differences in Japanese input environments, and substitutions with other linguistic forms.