초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper investigates factors that contribute to the high rate of mistaken passivization phenomenon of English unaccusative verbs by Korean EFL learners. By modifying the questionnaire employed by Ju (2000) to test for the pragmatic influence of a conceptualizable agent on the overpassivization rate, this study focuses on the impact of animate entities with respect to subjecthood and agentivity. Two experiments of this study manipulate animacy levels of the subjects and of the conceptual agents respectively to see whether overpassivization errors are from learners’ misunderstanding of unaccusative constructions as instances of passive. Our results show that there is an increase in the acceptance of a mistaken passivization when the subject of the unaccusative sentence is inanimate and when a conceptualizable agent in the priming sentence is animate, indicating that animacy exerts its influences on interlanguage grammar of Korean learners of English with respect to the use of passive morphology. Previously studied factors in the overpassivization literature such as L2 intralanguage interference from unaccusatives with an alternating form and L1 negative transfer from morphological differences in argument realization are also given factorial consideration.
