Uses of Transitive-Intransitive Verb Pairs by Learners of Japanese : An Analysis of KY Corpus

Abstract

In this paper, the uses of transitive-intransitive verb pairs appearing in the natural speech of learners of Japanese, based on OPI speech data, were analyzed. The findings indicate: 1) There are indications of similarities in the acquisition of transitive and intransitive verbs among English, Chinese and Korean learners of Japanese, that is, errors with transitive and intransitive verbs emerge in the data with upper level rather than intermediate level learners. 2) Various transitive and intransitive verbs are found in the error sentences. 3) Three types of transitive and intransitive verb pairs can be seen to be used by learners. These are: (1) both the transitive and intransitive verbs in the pairs are used; (2) most learners prefer only one verb of the transitive - intransitive pair; (3) learners have a preference for either the transitive or the intransitive verb of the pair, in roughly similar proportions. These results indicate that learners do not always use both transitive and intransitive verbs and may have some universal preference.