Why Do Korean EFL Learners Overpassivize English Unaccusative Verbs?

Why Do Korean EFL Learners Overpassivize English Unaccusative Verbs?

This paper investigates the overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs by Korean learners of English and compares Korean EFL learners’ difficulty of acquiring the verbs with that of Japanese EFL learners. A grammar test was performed to elicit Korean and Japanese learners’ competence of English unaccusative verbs. Korean learners’ developmental pattern showed that the learners’ L1, Korean, affects the acquisition of English unaccusative verbs for the beginning and intermediate learners. However, even the advanced learners of English still feel the difficulty acquiring the verbs, which can imply that the differences between English and Korean regarding unaccusative verbs influence Korean learners’ acquisition of English unaccusative verbs to some extent. Contrary to the prediction of the Japanese learners’ difficulty, which derived from the prevalent passive construction in Japanese, Japanese learners of the present study, who had intermediate proficiency of English, showed the highest level of acquisition and the near mastery of English unaccusative verbs. The results of the study showed that Korean learners’ acquisition problems of English unaccusative verbs can be partly explained by L1 transfer. However, neither L1 transfer nor universal constraints of the verbs can explain the acquisition of English unaccusative verbs by the Japanese subjects of the present study.