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The purpose of this study is to investigate the SLA mechanism through the interlanguage analysis of the relation between the modal acquisition and the grammaticalization. I examined how both Japanese EFL learners and American JSL learners acquired the usage of modal auxiliaries. According to my research of the former, unexpectedly, epistemic uses of modality tend to appear earlier than deontic ones. One main claim made in the present study is that this acquisition order is in the opposite direction of the shift from deontic to epistemic modality, which is described in a model based on grammaticalization theory.
One possible cause of this reverse acquisition order is a cognitive factor. This factor comes from the difference of an acquisition schema. That is, English modal auxiliaries do not have two separate unrelated senses, but rather show an extention of the basic deontic sense to the epistemic domain. It must be noted, however, in Japanese, epistemic modality and deontic modality are synchronically unrelated. Specifically the irrealis marker contributes toward explicating Japanese epistemic modality.
Finally, I will argue the relevance of these findings to the factor that affects the development of the epistemic modality, namely, the cognitive complexity of spistemic notions.
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