Abstract:
TheData from adult L2 learners were used to test the psychological reality of
the finding in linguistics that the reason some verbs alternate and others
do not is strictly determined by the verb’s meaning (Pinker, 1989; Levin
and Rappaport Hovav, 1995). The paper outlines the syntactic and
semantic structure of the English dative verbs and then examines the
learners’ knowledge of the syntactic consequences of the verbs the
semantics of which they demonstrate to know. The results provide
evidence for the lack of any overlap between the two types of
knowledge. The learners demonstrate appropriate knowledge of the
semantics of verbs. However, they exploit in a significant number of
cases only one form of the two available syntactic forms. The paper
concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for
learnability issues and outlines areas for further research.
Machine summary:
The Interface of Syntax and Semantics in L2 Hantkleh Marefat University of Tehran Abstract Data from adult L2 learners were used to test the psychological reality of the finding in linguistics that the reason some verbs alternate and others do not is strictly determined by the verb's meaning (Pinker, 1989; Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995).
The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for learnability issues and outlines areas for further research Key Words: syntax-semantics interface, dative alternation, double object datives, prepositional datives, learnability Introduction Many researchers in both first and second language acquisition have pointed out that dative alternation is one of the most problematic areas for both LI and L2 learners, The problem is that many dative verbs allow both the prepositional construction and the double object constniction.
The independent variables included level (advanced, high-intermediate, low-intermediate; elementary subjects were all excluded due to their poor performance on the Verb Translation Task, as elaborated above), Test Type (Grammaticality Judgment Test and Verb Classification Test), and Sentence Construction Type (Double Object Dative and Prepositional Dative was calculated using Cronbach Alpha.
e. , to see if Test Type (GJT and VCT) had any effect on subjects' performance at different levels, repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted.
The post-hoc Scheffe test results showed that low-intermediate subjects performed, quite like Grammaticality Judgment Test, significantly poorer than the other two levels.
The post-hoc Scheffe test results showed that the three groups performed significantly differently from each other in the Double Object dative sentences.