Overpassivization Revisited: Disentangling Syntax and Semantics in Causes of Errors.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Second Language Acquisition
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• English passives and unaccusatives exhibit shared syntactic and semantic features.
• Syntactic similarities are often cited as the cause of overpassivization errors in English learners' acquisition of unaccusative verbs.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine whether syntactic or semantic similarity drives English second language learners' overpassivization errors with unaccusative verbs.
• To investigate the cues influencing the incorrect application of passive structures to unaccusative verbs.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Assessed learners' representation of unaccusatives and passives sharing syntactic derivation by analyzing stress patterns.
• Experiment 2: Investigated reliance on thematic information by examining learners' agentivity ratings of unaccusative and unergative subjects.

Main Results:

• Experiment 1 yielded no conclusive evidence that learners perceive unaccusatives and passives as sharing syntactic derivation; even advanced learners showed distinct performance.
• Experiment 2 demonstrated that learners recognize semantic similarity, rating unaccusative subjects as less agentive, aligning with passive constructions.

Conclusions:

• Semantic similarity, specifically thematic role alignment between unaccusatives and passives, is the primary driver of overpassivization errors.
• Syntactic identity is not the main factor contributing to these acquisition errors in English learners.