A Critical Review of the Subject Animacy Analysis of Overpassivization in L2 English

Abstract

Since the 1970s, Overpassivization has long attracted the interest of many second language (L2) acquisition researchers who have claimed in the recent decade that subject animacy plays a key role in passive errors with unaccusatives―that is, Overpassivization occurs more frequently with inanimate subjects than with animate ones. While several researchers have widely espoused the analysis to account for Overpassivization, its predictions have rarely undergone critical examination. Hence, the present article focuses on Overpassivization and investigates its assumptions and predictions by analyzing the data available in the literature and additional data obtained from an L2 English learner corpus. It concludes that while subject animacy seems to initially influence Overpassivization, the subject animacy analysis, though appealing, is insufficient to fully explain Overpassivization. This study also suggests that agentivity, not animacy, matters to Overpassivization, providing evidence for this agentivity analysis from two previous studies.