Overgeneralisation in Second Language Acquisition of Transitivity Alternations

MATSUNAGA Keiko

doi:10.11431/secondlanguage2002.4.0_75

The present study investigates the overgeneralisation of properties of transitivity alternations in interlanguage grammars. Previous studies of the acquisition of argument structure have suggested that learners tend to make errors by overgeneralising passives (The window was broken where natives use The window broke, *The letter was arrived, *The child was cried) and overgeneralising causatives (*The postman arrived the letter, *The dentist cried the child). A question is whether these errors are observed to the same extent among L2 learners regardless of their L1, and what triggers such errors (e.g. discourse context or L1 transfer). To answer these questions, an experimental study was conducted with Spanish-and Japanese-speaking adult L2 learners of English. The results from an acceptability judgement task and a translation-based production task show differences in overgeneralisation errors between language groups (Spanish vs. Japanese), proficiency levels (lower vs. upper proficiency level) and verb classes (unaccusative verbs vs. unergative verbs). The analysis suggests that learners know the unaccusative/unergative distinction, since more overgeneralisation errors were found with the non-alternating unaccusative verbs compared with the unergative verbs; the unaccusatives have a dyadic structure which allows alternations, while the unergatives have universally a monadic structure at the level of the lexical argument structure. On the other hand, a cross-linguistic difference has been found in overpassivisation errors that appear to reflect different derivational patterns with distinct morphological marking (anti-causative and de-causative morphemes) in the L1. That is, Spanish only has a morphological reflex marking the anti-causative, whilst Japanese has morphological reflexes of de-causativisation and causativisation as well.

Overgeneralisation in Second Language Acquisition of Transitivity Alternations

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