L2 Acquisition of Surface Unaccusativity in English

• Published in: SECOND LANGUAGE Vol. 4; no. May; pp. 111 - 139
• Main Author: KURIBARA, Chieko
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Japan Second Language Association 01.05.2005; 日本第二言語習得学会
• Subjects: English as a Second Language Learning; Existential Constructions; Expletives; Extended Projection Principle; Interlanguage; Licensing; Valence
• ISSN: 1347-278X; 2187-0047
• DOI: 10.11431/secondlanguage2002.4.0_111

The present study investigates Japanese learners' acquisition of the expletive there construction, the only construction that demonstrates surface unaccusativity in English (Leven and Rappaport Hovav, 1995). The aim is to discover Japanese EFL learners' knowledge of the Case licensing property of unaccusative verbs and be, adopting the framework put forward by Belletti (1988). Unaccusatives and be in English are capable of optionally assigning partitive Case to their single internal argument (Lasnik, 1992, 1995). As a result, the argument DP can stay in its base position, and there is inserted into the subject position to fulfil the Extended Projection Principle (EPP). The DP has to be indefinite because partitive is incompatible with definiteness. In Japanese, in contrast, the same type of verb obligatorily assigns nominative Case to its pre-verbal internal argument, and no DP needs to be inserted into the subject position because the EPP is weak (Yatsushiro, 1996, 1999). With respect to passives and unergatives, English and Japanese share the same properties. Based on this framework, a pioneering study by Hirakawa (2003b) claims that her intermediate-level learners might have acquired the partitive Case of be but not of unaccusatives. To examine the validity of her conclusion, a grammaticality judgement test has been administered to four groups of learners (ranging from Elementary to Advanced) and native speakers of English. The test includes two types of construction ('DP-V'and 'There-V-DP') varying as to verb type (unergative; passive; unaccusative I, expressing 'existence' or 'appearance'; unaccusative II, denoting other meanings; be) and definiteness of DP. Results show that learners come to know the (sub) types of verb that can occur with expletive there, but that even advanced learners have difficulty in eliminating the possibility of other verbs (i.e. unergative and unaccusative II) occurring in the construction. In addition, they have failed to reject '*There-Unaccusative I / be-definite DP'. Based on these outcomes, it is argued that the lexical Case associated with the particular classes of verb cannot be acquired by adult learners. As an alternative account, it is claimed that the there construction in Japanese-English interlanguage is the result of applying their L1 lexical semantics and morphophonological knowledge.