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Causatives and Transitivity in L2 English
Author(s) -
Montrul Silvina
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9922.00148
Subject(s) - transitive relation , linguistics , turkish , psychology , interlanguage , grammar , causative , alternation (linguistics) , verb , mathematics , philosophy , combinatorics
This study investigates whether Spanish‐ and Turkish‐speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a Picture Judgment Task show that L2 learners do discover these properties, and that overall verbs appear to cluster in classes in their interlanguage grammars. However, the Turkish group, at a lower proficiency level than the Spanish one, accepted transitivity errors with unaccusative, unergative and non‐alternating transitive verbs. Although some of the developmental trends observed could be attributed to L1 influence, lower‐proficiency learners may start with a wider grammar, and therefore not differentiate lexico‐syntactically among different verb classes. With higher proficiency, L2 learners eventually recover from overgeneralizations.