A comparative study of pronominals in Persian and Japanese

Studies related to the second language acquisition have frequently focused on the role of mother tongue. Since the learner’s knowledge in the first language provides a basis to compare it with that of second language, it is assumed that being aware of the learner’s prior knowledge is affective in the syllabus design which itself is a crucial element in teaching. In this study personal pronouns and verbal subject markers are contrasted regarding the syntactic, morphological and semantic features. Contrastive analysis showed that personal pronouns in Persian and Japanese are similar in total characteristics like person and number. Moreover, they act alike in taking antecedent. Although there are some similarities, it can be seen that there are some problems due to the formal and functional differences like “zero” pronoun in Japanese. The main differences between Persian and Japanese were found to be the forms representing pronouns. Persian shows this feature by the inflections of pronoun but in Japanese these features are of no representation and the context makes it manifested.