한국인 EFL 학습자들의 영어 비대격 동사 습득연구

This study examines the L2 acquisition of English unaccusative verbs by Korean EFL learners. L2 learners of English, including Korean learners of English, tend to accept the ungrammatical passive forms of happen-type unaccusative verbs, judging them to be grammatical. One hundred and five Korean college students, who were divided into three proficiency groups, took a grammaticality judgment test in which they were asked to judge whether transitive and passive sentences including unaccusative verbs were grammatically correct or not. The results showed that the English unaccusative verbs caused great learning difficulty for the learners of the beginning and the intermediate groups. The learners of the advanced group were superior to other groups in their ability to judge the grammaticality of the verbs. Among the four unaccusative verbs, the two verbs, die and happen, caused more difficulty than the other two unaccusative verbs. The difficulty L2 learners feel regarding English unaccusative verbs can be explained as an overgeneralization of the passive to unaccusative verbs because the learners falsely assume that English unaccusative verbs take passive morphology when the thematic role of theme or patient is mapped in the position of subject as the passive sentence.