Effects of Cause and Animacy on the EFL Acquisition of Attributive Psych Adjectives

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate the acquisition of attributive participle adjectives derived from two types of psych verbs: Experiencer-Object (EO) verbs and Experiencer-Subject (ES) verbs. It has been argued that participle adjectives ending with -ing (Ving adjectives), different from those ending in -ed (Ved adjectives), involve a zero CAUSE morpheme (Duffield 2005), which is salient with inanimate nouns when the morpheme is suffixed to EO verbs (Zhang 2007, 2015). For a fuller picture of the roles of the zero CAUSE and animacy in the EFL acquisition of Ved and Ving adjectives, this paper explores both of the psych verb types (EO and ES) from which their deverbal adjectives are derived, as well as the participle types (Ved and Ving), and animacy of modified nouns (animate and inanimate). Analyses of acceptability judgments by Korean adult learners of English reveal that the less proficient learners were not sensitive to animacy and that even the advanced learners were ignorant of the zero CAUSE but sensitive to argument structure, yielding overgeneralization with ill-formed Ving adjectives derived from ES verbs. The results also show that the less proficient groups preferred Ving adjectives to Ved ones and had difficulty detecting incongruity of Ved adjectives derived from EO verbs with inanimate nouns, which is interpretable as strong L1 transfer.