Individual Verb Differences in Korean Learners Use of English Non-alternating Unaccusatives

Abstract

This study investigates individual verb differences in Korean learners‟ use of English non-alternating unaccusatives as well as the factors that influence various errors. Specifically, it focuses on the effects of L1 transfer and animacy of subjects on overpassivization errors. Concordance lines from a learner corpus consisting of 6,572 essays written by Korean college-level learners were analyzed to observe the syntactic distribution across ten non-alternating unaccusative verbs. The results revealed that overpassivization errors show disproportionate dispersion across the ten unaccusative verbs, and that Korean L1 influence is not a significant factor while inanimate subjects influence overpassivization. Furthermore, salient error patterns such as transitivization and overgenerated be were identified from the Korean learners‟ use of unaccusative verbs. This study proposes that some unaccusative verbs are more susceptible to overpassivization errors, and that Korean learners of English will benefit from being able to identify the factors contributing to errors for each unaccusative verb.