Agentivity of passives and inchoatives in second language learners of English and Korean

Second language (L2) learners' overpassivization of unaccusatives such as '*the accident was happened' have been widely investigated. One popular account claims that L2 learners lexically causativize unaccusatives and then syntactically passivize them. This study suggests an alternative possibility: Passive unaccusatives may be caused by learners' confusion in the agentivity of passives and inchoatives. This study therefore explores whether L2 learners know the distinction between passives and inchoatives in terms of agentivity. (a) The window was Broken. (passive) (b) The window broke. (inchoative) Unlike inchoatives, passives imply the agent even if not expressed in the syntax. The results of the EFL study showed that L2 learners have knowledge of constructional meanings of passives and inchoatives but did not show their knowledge when there was no agent in context given as a stimulus for conceptualization. In the KFL study, L2 learners showed native-like knowledge of the passive and the inchoative in Korean. The results suggests that L2 learners' overpassivization can be caused by their incomplete knowledge of constructional meanings.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Joo, Hye Ri

Statement dc:rights

• All UHM dissertations and theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner.

Identifier

9780549596820

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/20887