Is it Wa or is it Ga – that is the question: A study of Swedish learners’ knowledge of the Japanese particles Wa and Ga

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to test Swedish Japanese learners’ knowledge of the Japanese topic and subject markers, wa and ga. This was done through sending out surveys, where the participants were forced to choose an answer out of four options for each sentence. The four types of sentences which were tested were embedded clauses with individual-level predicates, embedded clauses with stage-level predicates, main clauses with individual-level predicates and main clauses with stage-level predicates. In the end, the conclusion was that Swedish Japanese learners had a relatively good knowledge of wa and ga in the four sentence types, except in embedded clauses, especially embedded clauses with individual-level predicates. Overall, the Swedish learners of Japanese preferred wa over ga. Furthermore, participants that had studied at Lund University or had studied in Japan before preferred for the most part the same particles as the Japanese native speakers in the sentence types, except in main clauses with stage-level predicates.