The Acquisition of English Unergative and Unaccusative Verbs: A Case Study of Lattakian Native Speakers

Abstract

One of the goals of second language acquisition research is to find a theory which can predict and explain what second language learners can acquire. The acquisition of unergative and unaccusative verbs has been one of the issues addressed in second language acquisition. A number of studies indicated that these verbs pose an acquisition problem especially in English L2 acquisition. This study investigates the Lattakian Syrian Arabic speakers’ acquisition of English unergative and unaccusative verbs based on the cross-linguistic, syntactic analyses of the structures involving these verbs across Lattakian Syrian Arabic and English. The paper reports on empirical findings from grammaticality judgment, translation, and picture description tasks in English as a second language. The grammaticality judgment task was meant to tap into learner’s competence on the two verb types, whereas the latter two tasks on their performance. The findings largely support the theoretical position that argues for the existence of first language influence at the early stages of acquisition, and for no fundamental differences in native speaker and second language syntactic representations at later stages of acquisition, a position such as the Full Transfer Full Access hypothesis. The findings also unfold crucial factors which seem to be at play in the acquisition of intransitive verbs, ones such as learners’ world knowledge, and the morphological structure of the verbs at question.