A Study Of EFL Learners’ Unaccusative Verbs

Since Unaccusative Hypothesis was put forward by Perlmutter (1978), which was later conformed with the Generative Grammar by Burzio (1986), unaccusatives have interested many researchers in the fields of theoretical linguistics and SLA. Unaccusative verbs are one of the two classes of intransitive verbs, according to generative grammar, the subject of an unaccusative in the S-structure is moved from its internal argument in the D-structure. Previous researches show that EFL learners have problems with English unaccusatives, some discuss in theory, others study through empirical methods. In the field of SLA, Sorace proposed the Unaccusative Hierarchy Hypothesis (UHH), which argues that EFL learners acquire unaccusatives from cores to peripherals. Oshita put forward the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis (UTH) on the basis of his research, which states that the development of EFL learners’unaccusatives appears to be a U-shaped pattern. Previous studies mainly focused on the’passive’unaccusatives, the pattern of NP-be-Ven, but they do not agree with one another on the causes of’passive’.This paper studies EFL learners’unaccusatives by the means of using large learners’corpora. Three sub-corpora in ICLE, German, Italian and Russian, which belong to different language families, and another three sub-corpora in CLEC, ST2, ST4and ST6, which fall into different levels of English, are chosen in the research. A transverse analysis among sub-corpora of L1different learners, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese (ST6), and a quasi-longitudinal analysis of L1Chinese learners at different levels in English, ST2,ST4,ST6, indicate that Learners’ use of English unaccusatives is significantly influenced by four factors including language transfer (LT), overgeneralization (OG), transfer of training (TT) and language universals (LU) when they use English unaccusatives. Taking all correct patterns into account, however, a strong correlation appeared between each pair of the learners’ use of unaccusatives. The longitudinal comparisons also support four-factor account and UHH, but not UTH, for there does not exist a U-shaped development in learners’ acquisition of English unaccusatives. So I argue that the four factors (LT, OG, TT, LU) greatly affect learners’ use of English unaccusatives, but in different patterns.Furthermore, I conclude, in the perspective of Universal Grammar, that these four factors influence the parameter setting of the interlanguage, during which they may interact with one another. At last, I give pedagogical advice as well.