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In:Language Learning, Discourse and Cognition: Studies in the tradition of Andrea Tyler
Edited by Lucy Pickering and Vyvyan Evans
[Human Cognitive Processing 64] 2018
► pp. 213–247

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Chapter 9
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Overpassivization and unaccusativity as L2 construction learning

Published online: 20 December 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.64.10ort
Abstract
It is well known that many L2 users overpassivize unaccusatives. The same L2 users may also be reluctant to accept constructions with unaccusative meanings. We examined the responses from 56 L2 users of English on a scaled grammaticality judgment task. We predicted that performance would be negatively affected in the presence of a conceptualizable agent in the discourse scene that biases an external causation construal and with low-frequency verbs and alternating verbs. We found clear effects for frequency and alternation in the hypothesized direction. However, there was no evidence for an independent contribution of the conceptualization bias condition. Our study supports the claim that learners build their L2 grammars by abstracting not only the statistical properties but also the complex, polysemous meanings of the constructions they experience in usage.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overpassivation and unaccusativity
    • 2.1Unaccusatives as types of predicates
    • 2.2Event construal of causation in unaccusative constructions
  • 2.3L2 learning of unaccusatives as construction learning
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Corpus-based selection of target verbs
    • 3.3Scaled acceptability judgment task
    • 3.4Procedure
    • 3.5Analyses
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Why did the availability of a conceptualizable agent make only a subtle difference?
    • 5.2The importance of considering crosslinguistic influence
    • 5.3Frequency is key to L2 learning, but is no panacea
    • 5.4In defense of the centrality of discourse meaning in constructional learning
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Kim, Jieun, Shinshil Han & Sang-Ki Lee
2025.  An accident was happened? Conceptual and input biases in the overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching DOI logo

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