抄録
Since the introduction of the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter, 1978), the acquisition of unaccusativity has drawn the attention of many researchers in the field of first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. One extremely examined aspect of unaccusative acquisition is passivization errors, commonly referred to as overpassivization of unaccusative verbs. This article discusses two accounts of the ungrammatical passivization phenomenon—the passivization of non-target lexical causativization and the overt marking of NP-movement. The two analyses offer entirely opposite predictions: the former account predicts passive errors in the long passive structure and lexical causative errors; whereas the latter does not expect these errors. The present study investigates passive and causative errors by analyzing Japanese-speaking L2 English learners’ written production with unaccusative and unergative verbs observed in a large learner’s corpus. The study results demonstrated that learners are unlikely to produce unaccusatives in the long passive and the lexical causative constructions, strongly supporting the NP-movement account. Furthermore, passive errors were more found when the subject was inanimate than when it was animate. The finding suggests that subject animacy influences passivization errors.
