A Study On Overpassivization Of English Unaccusative Verbs Within EFL Context

Perlmutter’s Unaccusative Hypothesis (1978) claimed that there are two types ofintransitive verbs, namely, unergative verbs and unaccusative verbs. Through someuniversal principles in relational grammar, Perlmutter demonstrates that the only theargument of unergative verbs is the subject at D-structure but of unaccusative verbs isthe object at D-structure. Unergative verbs suggest willed or volitional action whileunaccusative verbs mean unwilled or unvolitional actions.The proposal of Unaccusative Hypothesis aroused the interest of many linguisticresearchers. They have been applying it to their own languages. Overpassivization, aphenomenon defined as nontargetlike or nonnativelike passivization of intransitiveverbs by L2or FL learners, is a common phenomenon in English inter-language and itis a popular problem in second language acquisition. This study will examine thisproblem from lexical-semantic and cognitive perspectives. In Lexical SemanticStructure theory,“argument structures are projection (via linking rules) of verbs’semantic structures”(Pinker,1989) and verb meanings are decomposed into a finite setof grammatically relevant semantic primitive elements. Meanwhile, Levin&Rappaport Hovav (1995) point out that the unaccusativity varies in unaccusative verbs,presenting a tendency from core to periphery.This paper does a comprehensive research on overpassivization errors ofunaccusative verbs. Participants in previous studies are mostly college students or evenEnglish majors who are by no means low proficiency learners. Through investigation,we found that in Chinese Junior Middle School, many intransitive verbs appear in theirEnglish word list, such as “appear, arrive, break, etc”. The first part of this studyendeavors to investigate Chinese English-beginners’ overpassivization errors through achoice-task, and then finds out the cause of the phenomenon through an interview. Theresult suggests that Chinese middle school students do have difficulty in choosing thevioce of unaccusative verbs, and most of them are in favor of “TransitivizationAccount”. The next part of this study analyzes the roles of lexical-semantics andcausation types played in overpassivization errors of unaccusative verbs. The findingsare:1) According to the subclasses of unaccusative verbs, we can find that the verbswith strong unaccusativity are easily acquired by learners. And the weaker theunaccusativity is, the harder it will be acquired.2) Unaccusative verbs are significantlymore likely to be passivized in externally caused situations than in internally caused situations.3) Overpassivization of unaccusatives is more sensitive to theunaccusativity strength in externally caused situations.