| The purpose of this dissertation was an examination of overgeneralized lexical structures in adult second language acquisition of English. The approach for describing the alternation was based on a theory of lexical and syntactic interface, or lexical semantics, as developed by Pinker (1989). Hypotheses derived from the semantically constrained definition of the causative were tested with 77 non-native speakers of English in three separate experiments. Experiment One, a free production task, showed that non-native speakers had correctly and consistently acquired the argument structures related to a small set of English verbs, both alternating and non-alternating in the causative. Experiment Two, a controlled production task, revealed that subjects distinguished between alternating and non-alternating verbs in production, with performance improving as proficiency increased. Experiment Three, a judgment task with novel verbs, suggested that learner performance was not based on the same semantic constraints for causative transitivity that native speakers use. Non-native speaker intuitions were influenced by semantic type and by native language, without a main effect for proficiency. These results implied that learners of English recovered from overgeneralizations in production, but that such recovery did not depend on native-like organization at the level of lexical structure. |
