"What is happened" may not be what appears to be happening: a corpus study of 'passive' unaccusatives in L2 English

Second Language (L2) researchers have been studying 'passive' unaccusative errors such as What was happened?, but have not yet reached a consensus about the ultimate cause of this unique interlanguage structure. This article critically reviews five major accounts proposed in the literature...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Second language research 2000-10, Vol.16 (4), p.293-324
Main Author: Oshita, Hiroyuki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adjectivals
Applied Linguistics
Corpus linguistics
English (Second Language)
English language learners
Error Analysis (Language)
Expletives
Generalization
Grammar
Interlanguage
Language
Language Research
Linguistics
Literary criticism
Morphosyntax
Native language
Noun phrases
Passives
Researchers
Second Language Learning
Second Languages
Sentences
Studies
Syntactic analysis
Syntactic movement
Syntactics
Teaching
Tense
Transitive verbs
Verbs
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Second Language (L2) researchers have been studying 'passive' unaccusative errors such as What was happened?, but have not yet reached a consensus about the ultimate cause of this unique interlanguage structure. This article critically reviews five major accounts proposed in the literature, namely: • transfer of a compound tense/aspect structure in the learner's first language (L1); • overgeneralization of adjectival passive formation in English; • nontarget lexical causativization; • identification of the passive morphosyntax with the lack of a logical subject; and • nontarget overt marking of syntactic NP movement. By analysing each account in terms of its ramifications in light of the data already available in the literature and additional data from a large corpus of nonnative English, I demonstrate that the most plausible account of the 'passive' unaccusative structure is to regard it as an overt marker of NP movement, an overgeneralization of the passive morphosyntax of the target English.
ISSN:0267-6583
1477-0326
DOI:10.1177/026765830001600401