A Multi-method Approach to Korean Speakers’ Acquisition of Unaccusativity in English

Abstract

This study exploits the benefits of combining corpora and experimental methods to investigate how Korean speakers acquire unaccusativity in English. Focusing on overpassivization, we comprehensively investigated three questions: (i) Are Korean speakers sensitive to the unaccusative/unergative distinction in English? (ii) Are they able to distinguish unaccusatives from transitives? (iii) Which factors among agentivity, telicity, and animacy do they rely on? We explored both native and learner corpora consisting of approximately 40 million words to analyze the collostructural patterns of the overpassivized forms. We also administered acceptability judgement tests to 173 learners and 27 native speakers. The results from both methods converge. (i) Replicating previous studies, we substantiated that Korean speakers can distinguish unaccusatives from unergatives. (ii) We discovered that they can also distinguish unaccusatives from transitives. (iii) We further found that telicity has an effect on overpassivization of unaccusatives. This study is meaningful in obtaining the findings by using a combination of corpus and experimental methods to provide a more rigorous test of L2 learners’ knowledge of unaccusativity.