CHAPTER ONEGENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research orientation
The present study investigates the reasons that triggered Chinese EFL learners’overpassivization of English unaccusatives on an on-line grammaticality judgmenttask, highlighting four factors (learners’ English proficiency level, verb frequency,animacy hierarchy of subject, verb alternation), which can be divided into two types(input factors and conceptualization factors), on the on-line processing of Englishunaccusatives. The input factors refer to the extra-linguistic factors, andconceptualization factors refer to the syntactic and semantic properties of thelanguage itself. In the present study, learners’ English proficiency level, verbfrequency belongs to the former type, while animacy hierarchy of subject and verbalternation belongs to the latter type.The purpose of the present study is twofold: (i) to find out whether the fourfactors influence the on-line processing of English unaccusatives, and (ii) within theframework of usage-based model, to examine whether the effect of theconceptualization factors is modulated by the input factors in the on-line processing ofEnglish unaccusative verbs.
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1.2 Research background
Intransitive verb is not homogenous, but can be divided into two sub-classes:unergatives (e.g. laugh, walk) and unacusatives (e.g. happen, fall) (Burzio 1986,Perlmutter 1987). The surface subject of unergatives plays the role of agent, which isthe underlying subject, while the surface subject of unaccusatives takes the role ofpatient, which is underlying object. The unaccusative verb entails two subtypes, one isalternating unaccusative (e.g. change, stop), which has a transitive counterpart, theother is non-alternating unaccusative (e.g. arrive, tremble) which has no transitivecounterpart. The unaccusative-unergative distinction is also called split intransitivityor unaccusativity. This incongruence in the form-meaning of unaccusatives posedgreat difficulty for second language (L2) learners of English. The verbs in above sentences which should be used in active voice but areincorrectly passivized, and this kind of error is known as overpassivization, aphenomenon defined as nontargetlike or nonnativelike passivization of intransitiveverbs by L2 or FL learners (Yip 1990). According to Oshita (2017), it is one of themost universal, conspicuous and persistent errors of L2 learners. Moreover, theincorrectly passivized verbs mostly fall into one type of intransitive verbs:unaccusative verbs, which afflict L2 learners irrespective of their L1 backgrounds andeven L2 learners at an advanced level.Overpassivization of English unaccusatives has aroused the interest of secondlanguage acquisition (SLA) researchers (Balcom 1997, Hirakawa 1995, Ju 2017,Montrul 1999, 2017, Oshita 1997, 2017, 2017, Sorace & Shomura 2017, Yip 1990,1995, Zobl 1989, Zyzik 2017), who have conducted large quantities of investigationson it and proposed many accounts for overpassivization of English unacusatives fromdifferent perspectives.
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CHAPTER TWOLITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Overview
The current chapter consists of three parts. The first part gives a brief sketch ofunaccusitivity and overpassivization errors. The second part reviews major accountsfor overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs from four different perspectives:L1 transfer, Universal Grammar, cognition and usage-based languag，英语论文网站，英语毕业论文 |
