Second language acquisition of lexically constrained transitivity alternations: Acquisition of the causative alternation by second language learners of English

The purpose of this dissertation was an examination of overgeneralized lexical structures in adult second language acquisition of English. The approach for describing the alternation was based on a theory of lexical and syntactic interface, or lexical semantics, as developed by Pinker (1989). Hypotheses derived from the semantically constrained definition of the causative were tested with 77 non-native speakers of English in three separate experiments. Experiment One, a free production task, showed that non-native speakers had correctly and consistently acquired the argument structures related to a small set of English verbs, both alternating and non-alternating in the causative. Experiment Two, a controlled production task, revealed that subjects distinguished between alternating and non-alternating verbs in production, with performance improving as proficiency increased. Experiment Three, a judgment task with novel verbs, suggested that learner performance was not based on the same semantic constraints for causative transitivity that native speakers use. Non-native speaker intuitions were influenced by semantic type and by native language, without a main effect for proficiency. These results implied that learners of English recovered from overgeneralizations in production, but that such recovery did not depend on native-like organization at the level of lexical structure.