The Role of Animacy in the Acquisition of Ergative Verbs by Japanese Learners of English

Abstract

　　The purpose of this study is to investigate how Japanese Learners of English (JLEs) acquire English ergative verb usages, and is to claim that difficulty of ergative verb usages in English for JLEs is due largely to the properties of sentential subject nouns. Since both Japanese (L1) and English (L2) have ergative verbs, it can be assumed that JLEs’ acquisition of intransitive and transitive usages of English ergative verbs are equally easy as long as the L1 transfer positively works. It has also been claimed in previous studies dealing with the acquisition of wh-questions and/or relative clauses that animacy of the sentential subject affects L2 learners’ correct judgement of grammaticality of sentence. Sixty-five adult JLEs with relatively low English proficiency took a grammaticality judgement task. They were asked to judge the usages of 15 ergative verbs. The results showed that (a) the JLEs have more difficulty judging the grammaticality of intransitive usages than that of transitive usages, (b) sentences with animate subjects are easier to judge correctly than those with inanimate, and (c) sentences with inanimate subjects in intransitive usages are the most difficult structures for the JLEs to judge their grammaticality correctly. Thus, the overall findings indicate that the JLEs are strongly influenced by the semantic properties of subjects that each ergative verb structure has.