Why is this happened? Passive morphology and unaccusativity

• Published in: Second language research Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 1 - 9
• Main Author: Balcom, Patricia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Thousand Oaks, CA Arnold 1997; SAGE Publications; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Argument structure; Chinese; Chinese languages; Chinese People; Cloze Procedure; College Students; Comparative Analysis; Control Groups; Criminal sentencing; Didaktische Grundlageninformation; Englischunterricht; English; English (Second Language); English as a Second Language; English Language Learners; Fremdsprachenunterricht; Graduate Study; Grammar; Grammatical Acceptability; Grammaticality; Grammatikalische Kompetenz; Hypotheses; Interimssprache; Intransitivität; Language Patterns; Language Research; Linguistic Theory; Linguistics; Morphologie; Morphology; Morphology (Languages); Native languages; Native Speakers; Passiv; Passive Voice; Passives; Second Language Learning; Second language writing; Semantics; Semantik; Sentences; Syntactics; Syntax; Theoretical linguistics; Transitive verbs; Undergraduate Study; Verbform; Verbs; Zweitsprachenerwerbsforschung; Canada
• ISSN: 0267-6583; 1477-0326
• DOI: 10.1191/026765897670080531

Zobl discussed inappropriate passive morphology ('be' and the past participle) in the English writing of L2 learners, linking its occurrence to the class of unaccusative verbs and proposing that learners subsume unaccusatives under the syntactic rule for passive formation. The research reported here supports and amplifies Zobl's proposal, based on a grammaticality judgement task and a controlled production task containing verbs from a variety of subclasses of unaccusatives. The tasks were administered to Chinese L1 learners of English and a control group of English native speakers. Results show that subjects both used and judged as grammatical inappropriate passive morphology with all verbs falling under the rubric of unaccusativity. The article concludes with linguistic representations which maintain Zobl's insights but are consistent with current theories of argument structure. (Verlag).