A multi-method approach to Korean speakers' acquisition of unaccusativity in English

Year
2021
Volume 22
Issue 1
Pages
135-186
Authors
Sanghoun Song, Eunjeong Oh
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.