English Psychological Verb and Optimal L2 Acquisition

English Psychological Verb and Optimal L2 Acquisition

It has been well known that the English psychological verb is one of the most complicated verb to acquire because of its weird syntactic characteristics. In particular, for L2 learners, it usually takes comparatively longer time to acquire the syntactic behavior of psychological verb with structural complications. The most tricky part of psychological verb is the violation of c-command condition which has been known to be very universally applicable to almost all syntactic phenomenon. In this study, I show that the substantially intricate problem involved in psychological verb construction can be optimally explained through the interactions of the ranked violable universal constraints and can be efficiently acquired by L2 learners by teaching the hierarchy of those violable universal constraints. This study showed that Optimality Theory developed in phonology by Prince & Smolensky (1993) can also be applied to the acquisition of the psychological verb. The special syntactic behavior of psychological verbs has been reported in a number of languages by Giorgi (1984), Pesetsky (1997), Belletti (1986), and Rizzi (2003) among many others. The seemingly intricate complication in psychological verb construction can be explained by the interaction of the ranked violable constraints. The analysis I propose in this paper supports the approach of the violable constraint interaction framed in OT grammar.