چکیده:
The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context. The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating unaccusatives were common errors among Iranian English Majors. Level of language proficiency was a significant factor in the learners’ performance at both comprehension and production levels. There was a statistical significant correlation between the participants’ performances in the causativization and passivization errors with non-alternating verbs. The obtained results made it clear that language learners encounter serious problems in the acquisition of the verbs, and that more exposure to language input, explicit teaching of the verbs structures, and practice in different contexts can improve the situation.
خلاصه ماشینی:
(Incorrect overpassivized form) L2 learners encounter learnability problems with unaccusatives because, as referred to by Montrul (1999), mapping of lexico- conceptual structure onto lexico-syntactic structure requires syntax-semantic interface and acquiring this interface is time-consuming and occurs at the late stages of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) (Juffs, 1998; Levin & Hovav, 1995; Pinker, 1989).
L2 English learners also overgeneralize the passive construction with unccusative verbs (Balcom, 1997; Ju, 2000; Zobl, 1989); these studies point out that overpassivization occurs not just for the effect of L1 morphology but for the effect of argument structure and pragmatic factors, also.
Montrul (1997) studied transitivity alternation in second language acquisition in English, Spanish and Turkish to examine L2 learners’ transitivity errors with unaccusative and unergative verbs and their L1 influence on the acquisition of L2 derivational morphology of alternating verbs.
The researchers compare the production and comprehension of the causativization of the unaccusative verbs among three groups of learners: lower intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced Iranian English Majors; in this regard, the present study could be considered the first research done in Iran recently.
The paired-sample t-test results showed that Iranian English Majors made causativization errors with unaccusative verbs, both at the production and comprehension levels.
One of the probable reasons for the high rate of errors in comprehension and production of non-alternating unaccusatives is reported to be L1 influence (Cabrera & Zubizarreta, 2003; Juffs, 2000; Montrul, 2001; Moore, 1993; White, 2003) and overgeneralization (Bowerman, 1988; Zobl, 1989; Moore, 1993; Balcom, 1997; Ju, 2000; Ambridge et al.