More Evidence on the Unergative-Unaccusative Distinction in Second Language Grammars

Abstract

This study presents new evidence for the structural unergative-unaccusative distinction, in second language (L2) grammars, focusing on elementary-level Japanese-speaking learners of English (JLEs). The underlying distinction of unergatives-unaccusatives is often obscured on the surface strings due to independent syntactic properties such as feature-driven subject movement (in English) or headedness (in Japanese). Nevertheless, based on previous findings, elementary-level JLEs are expected to have reset headedness but have not acquired subject movement. Then, the resulting representation would not involve the properties obscuring the underlying unergative-unaccusative distinction and potentially exhibit it on the surface strings in L2 English. Following these observations, we carefully designed test sentences with un/grammatical word orders that elementary- level JLEs would generate and conducted an acceptability judgment task with native speakers of English and elementary-/intermediate-level JLEs. The results showed that, in contrast to native controls and intermediate learners, who exhibited target-like patterns, elementary-level JLEs incorrectly accepted ungrammatical word orders only with unaccusatives (e.g., *When did arrive the train?) but not those with unergatives (e.g., *Where did dance the man?). This discrepancy can be attributed to the sensitivity to the structural distinction of unergative-unaccusative verbs, and our data provide evidence for the creative construction of an interlanguage in L2 acquisition.journal articl