L2 acquisition of transitivity alternations and of the entailment relations for causatives by Korean speakers of English and English speakers of Korean

Recent research has claimed that the presence and/or absence of a morphological marking of causative/inchoative verbs in the learners' respective native language results in difficulty in the acquisition of these verbs in languages such as English, Spanish, and Turkish (Montrul 1999; 2000; 2001). My dissertation investigates this issue in the speech of Korean learners of English (ESL) and English-speaking learners of Korean (KSL).; In English the causative and inchoative verbs used in the transitive and intransitive constructions, respectively, have the same morphological form. Unlike English, however, in Korean the alternation is marked by morphologically related rather than identical forms of the verb in the transitive and intransitive constructions. Based on the differences in morphological marking of the causative/inchoative verbs between English and Korean, it is expected that L2 learners would show difficulty identifying these verbs where the two languages differ in terms of marking them.; In the study at hand, however, a pattern-based transfer account was put forward to explain the ESL learners' performance because a class-based transfer effect involving morphological properties proposed by Montrul (2001b) was not readily observed. In addition, the notion of a prototypical transitive event was proposed to account for the KSL learners' performance because they did not appear to have transferred a general pattern from their L1 in identifying alternating unaccusative verbs in Korean.; Results concerning another experiment, which investigated the L2 acquisition of entailment relations associated with lexical/morphological and syntactic causatives show that both ESL and KSL learners seem to have transferred the entailment relations from their L1 in identifying these causatives in the L2.; The reason that the findings in this study were different from Montrul's might lie in the fact that the learners who participated in this study might not be "true" beginner-level learners. My dissertation could contribute to determining which linguistic areas are more likely to transfer; for example, the domain of semantics (which includes entailment relations) seems to be one of the linguistic areas which is more prone to transfer from the L1 to the interlanguage grammar.