earticle

영어

This paper explores the transitivity bootstrapping hypothesis as a guide for determining telicity in English with Korean speakers. It hypothesizes that telic interpretations are linked to transitive frames and atelic ones to intransitive frames. The predicted pattern of acquisition is that the Korean participants would make errors with atelic transitives and telic intransitives since they are not supported by the hypothesis. The results show that they made the relevant distinction between telic and atelic items for three out of the four transitivity-telicity pairs, failing to do so for telic intransitives. These mistakes with telic intransitives are precisely the pattern predicted by the hypothesis. It confirms that the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis is part of the acquisition toolkit exploited by L2 learners. As for the puzzle of why telic intransitives, but not atelic transitives, were particularly vulnerable to transitivity bias, it is argued to be best explained by the Surface Generalization Hypothesis and prototypicality of telic transitive frames for telicity.