Lexical Constraints on the Acquisition of English Split Intransitivity-An Experimental Investigation of Chinese-speaking L2 Learners

Lexical Constraints on the Acquisition of English Split Intransitivity －An Experimental Investigation of Chinese-speaking L2 Learners Lili Wu School of Foreign Languages, Huaiyin Normal University, 111 West Changjiang Road, Huai’an City, 223300, Jiangsu, China Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, 41 Kawauchi Aoba-ku, Sendai City, 980-8576, Japan Abstract This study presents results of an experimental investigation into the acquisition of core-peripheral distinction in English split intransitivity. The purpose is to investigate whether L2 learners of English are sensitive to an aspectual and thematic hierarchy that underlies the core-peripheral distinction similarly to L2 learners of Romance languages who were found to be influenced by the Split Intransitivity Hierarchy (SIH) (Sorace, 2000, 2004, 2011). The SIH maintains that core verbs are consistently compatible with unaccusative diagnostics while peripheral verbs exhibit gradience to varying degrees. Two unaccusative diagnostics, the prenominal past participle (PPP) (Alexiadou et al., 2004) and cognate object (CO) construction (Levin and R. Hovav, 1995), were used to test native English speakers and Chinese-speaking L2 learners’ gradient acceptability with respect to core-peripheral verb classes. The results show that both native speakers and nonnative speakers are sensitive to the core-peripheral distinction in PPP, but they do not exhibit same sensitivity in CO construction. These findings give partial support for the cross-linguistic plausibility of the SIH to split intransitivity. 1 Introduction The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH), initially proposed by Perlmutter (1978) within Relational Grammar and later elaborated on by Burzio (1986) within Government and Binding Theory, classifies intransitive verbs into unergatives and unaccusatives based on their different syntactic and semantic properties. However, myriad empirical studies have repeatedly shown inconsistencies in the alignment between the syntactic and semantic properties of split intransitivity (Levin and R. Hovav, 1995; Borer, 2005). Thus, verbs with similar meanings in and across languages might be classified differently with respect to split intransitivity. The so-called “unaccustive mismatches” pose great challenges to the UH, a binary syntactic distinction that assumes a relationship of predictability between the syntax and semantics of intransitive verbs. There are mainly three approaches to deal with these kinds of mismatches at the lexicon-syntax interface (Bard et al., 2010). The first approach is known as the “projectionist” approach, which claims that the lexical semantic features of a verb project its arguments as either internal or external through linking rules (Levin and R. Hovav, 2005). The second is called “constructionist”, and maintains that split intransitivity is a sentence-level property of the predicate instead of a lexical property of the verb, and that the unaccusative-unergative distinction is inherently unstable (Borer, 2005). However, neither the projectionist nor the constructionist approach have offered a valid explanation for the PACLIC 32 746 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 by the author consistent behaviour of certain verbs and the systematic variation of others. Drawing on a series of empirical studies on both L1 and L2 acquisition of auxiliary selecting languages, Sorace (2000, 2004, 2011) proposes a third approach, the Split Intransitivty Hierarchy (SIH). …

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