An Empirical Study Of Overpassivization Of Unaccusative Verbs By Chinese Junior School Deaf Learners Of English

Intransitive verbs can be subdivided into unergatives and unaccusatives(Perlmutter 1981;Burzio 1986).The only argument of the former is the subject in deep-structure,which takes the role of the agent,while the only argument of the latter is the object in deep-structure,which takes the role of patient and lacks volition on the part of a subject.The incongruence in the form-meaning of English unaccusatives led L2 learners of English to often wrongly use them in the passive structure,thus making the error of overpassivization.This mistake aroused numerous L2 researchers’ attention and they put forward many accounts for overpassivization,such as the Post-verbal NP Movement Hypothesis(Zobl 1989),Transitivization Hypothesis(Yip1990,1995),the cognitive interpretation of causality(Ju 2000),and so on.While the above explanations have been proposed for hearing learners of English,the characteristics and causes of unaccusatives overpassivization verbs among deaf students have not been studied.Based on previous research findings,this study investigated the acquisition of English unaccusative verbs by Chinese junior high school deaf students in an attempt to answer three questions:(1)What kind of characteristics do Chinese junior high school deaf students display in their acquisition of English unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs?(2)What kind of characteristics do Chinese junior high school deaf students display in their acquisition of unaccusatives in the external causation context and in the internal causation context?(3)How do external causation and internal causation affect the acquisition of unaccusatives verbs by junior high school deaf students in China?Two forced-choice tasks were used in this study.The sentences of the grammatical choice task contain both unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs.The sentences with unaccusative verbs would in two contexts,namely,external and internal causation,and two sub-categories,alternating unaccusative verbs,and non-alternating unaccusative verbs,respectively.A total of 30 junior high school subjects participated in this experiment,i.e.15 in the deaf group and 15 in the hearing group.Their task was to make a one of two choose between the active and passive verbs containing unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs verbs.The results of the experiment were as follows:(1)Overpassivization errors were found in deaf students.Deaf students made more overpassivization errors in both unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs than hearing learners.(2)The deaf learners are found more liable to apply inappropriate passive morphology to non-alternating unaccusatives than to alternating unaccusatives.(3)The unaccusative-unergative distinction is correctly represented in deaf learners’ mental grammars.The deaf learners are found more liable to apply inappropriate passive morphology to the unaccusative verbs than to the unergative verbs,though the two types of verbs appear in the same surface sentence structures of the subject-verb order in the target language input.Unaccusative verbs were more difficult to acquire than unergative verbs,and there were differences in the acquisition of unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs by deaf students.(4)Pragmatic and cognitive factors had a greater influence on the use of unaccusative verbs by deaf learners.Deaf students tended to passive unaccusative verbs under the external causation context rather than the internal causation context.Unaccusative verbs under the external causation context is harder to acquire than that under the internal causation context.The results of this study largely demonstrate the psychological reality of the Unaccusative Hypothesis,Conceptualizable Agents Theory,and the Rule-Based Theory of Learning Alternating Unaccusatives in deaf students’ unaccusative acquisition.In addition to the cognitive,syntactic and semantic factors that have been suggested for hearing students,the causes and explanations for the phenomenon of passive generalisation of unaccusative verbs have been discussed.Deaf students face a greater challenge of negative transfer from their mother tongue in the acquisition of unaccusative verbs because of the differences in their Chinese sign language order and Chinese sign language verbs intransitivity property to English,which may also explain,to some extent,the fact that deaf students do not perform as well as hearing students in unaccusatives.