Download First-language-constrained variability in the second

Second Language Research 17,2 (2001); pp. 144–194
First-language-constrained variability
in the second-language acquisition of
argument-structure-changing
morphology with causative verbs
Silvina Montrul University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This article presents three related experiments on the acquisition of two
classes of causative verbs: physical change of state verbs with agentive
subjects (e.g., English break) and psychological change of state verbs with
experiencer objects (e.g., English frighten) in English, Spanish and Turkish
as second languages by speakers whose native languages are English,
Spanish, Turkish and Japanese. These verbs participate in the
causative/inchoative alternation crosslinguistically, but the morphological
expression of the alternation varies in the four languages. English has
predominantly zero-morphology, Spanish has anticausative morphology, and
Turkish and Japanese both have causative and anticausative morphology.
Assuming the tenets of the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz
and Sprouse, 1996), results of a picture judgement task testing transitive and
intransitive sentences and manipulating overt/non-overt morphology on the
verbs show that morphological errors in the three languages are constrained
by the morphological patterns of the learners’ first language (L1s). In
addition to showing that formal features of morphemes transfer but
morphophonological matrices do not, this study refines the role of L1
influence in the morphological domain by showing that the
morphophonological shape of affixes transfers as well.
I Morphology in second-language acquisition
It has long been observed that, among the different component of
linguistic knowledge, morphology is perhaps the most fragile during
second language (L2) grammatical development, at least initially
(Adjémian, 1983; Larsen-Freeman and Long, 1991: 254–55, 262).
During the course of L2 development some functional morphology
is not processed when making sense of input (van Patten, 1996),
and variability in the production of inflectional morphology – such
as omission of tense and agreement – is common. However,
morphology is not merely omitted: recent studies have shown that
Address for correspondence: Silvina Montrul, Department of Spanish, Italian and
Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4080 Foreign Languages Building,
MC-176, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; email: [email protected]
© Arnold 2001
0267-6583(01)SR179OA
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Silvina Montrul 145
other verbal morphology can be selectively overgeneralized
(Oshita, 2000a; 2000b; Toth, 2000) or even erroneously spelled out
(Lardière and Schwartz, 1997).
In current views of morphology – e.g., Halle and Marantz’s (1993)
Distributed Morphology or Beard’s (1995) Separation Hypothesis
– the term ‘f-morpheme’ refers to a syntactic terminal node and its
content (i.e., syntactico-semantic abstract features drawn from the
set made available by Universal Grammar), and not to the
phonological expression of that terminal node. L-morphemes
denote language specific concepts. L-morphemes and f-morphemes
represent the distinction between open class and closed class lexical
items. The traditional distinction between inflectional and
derivational morphology is blurred in this framework. Thus, I
assume that the argument structure changing morphemes that are
the focus of this article are also f-morphemes. The phonological
content of a vocabulary item may be any phonological string,
including zero (or Ø). This view is also implicit in the Minimalist
Program (Chomsky, 1995), where functional categories (DP, CP,
AgrP and TP) have abstract formal features that drive syntactic
movement. Abstract features have morphophonological spell-outs,
such that in English, for example, the functional category TP has
[± finite] and [± past] features, and with regular verbs these
features are morphologically expressed by the –ed affix or any of
its allomorphs. Phonological spell-outs, insertion of lexical items
and readjustment rules occur post-syntactically, at the level of
Morphological Form (MS).
This separation between formal features and phonological spellouts has taken centre stage in debates on the full availability of
Universal Grammar (UG) in the L2 acquisition of morphosyntax
and morphophonology. For example, in attempting to provide a
principled account of why learners systematically fail to produce
morphology, a number of researchers have argued that L2 learners
have ‘full competence’ with respect to functional categories, and
that variability in the use of L2 inflectional morphology is due to
surface morphophonological, rather than to abstract-featural,
problems (Epstein, et al., 1996, Grondin and White, 1996; Haznedar
and Schwartz 1997; Lardière and Schwartz 1997; Lardière, 1998a;
1998b; Prévost and White 1999; 2000). According to the Full
Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis of Schwartz and Sprouse (1996)
this is possible because abstract features transfer in full from the
first language (L1), but the morphophonological matrices do not.
It is therefore not surprising that L2 learners have problems with
the assembly, or computation (i.e., the operations Merge and Move;
Chomsky, 1995), of mapping formal features to language specific
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146
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
morphophonological forms. In contrast with the above view that
places the locus of the problem in the computational component,
Eubank et al. (1997), Hawkins and Chan (1997) and Beck (1998)
argue that morphological variability indicates major impairment to
the interlanguage grammar in the domain of the abstract features,
such that errors with morphology are indicative of deeper deficits
in linguistic knowledge (i.e., are a representational problem).
This study further pursues the idea that L2 learners have
problems with the overt realization of morphology, and defends the
position that the problem is morphophonological. In the spirit of
Lardière and Schwartz (1997), this work is specifically concerned
with the role of the first language on the mapping of formal features
to morphophonological spell-outs. The focus of this investigation is
on argument structure changing morphology, an area that seems to
be problematic for L2 learners as well, at least at initial stages.
Motivation for the present investigation comes from the
observation emerging from studies on object-experiencer psych
verbs (e.g., frighten): That in addition to a misalignment of thematic
roles to syntactic positions with these verbs – an issue that I make
more precise below – learners have difficulties realizing that these
verbs have a zero-causative morpheme in English (Chen, 1996;
White et al., 1998). However, if zero-causative morphology is
problematic with psych verbs, it ought to be problematic with other
causative verbs as well, and a series of studies on the argument
structure properties of causative change of state verbs (e.g., break,
melt) crosslinguistically seem to suggest so (Montrul, 1999a; 1999b;
2000a; 2000b; 2001). Moreover, a subsidiary implication of this line
of thought is that overt morphology should be easier to learn than
zero-morphology. To test these predictions this study focuses on a
comparison of the L2 acquisition of the morphological patterns of
causative verbs that denote a physical change of state and have
agentive subjects (e.g., break, melt) and psychological change of
state verbs with experiencer objects (e.g., frighten, bore), which
according to Pesetsky (1995) have zero-causative morphology in
English. By contrast, in Spanish, Turkish and Japanese these verbs
have overt causative and/or anticausative morphology. In common
with existing research investigating inflectional morphology
associated with functional categories, this study asks whether
morphological errors are unconstrained or predictable in
interlanguage grammars.
The results of three experimental studies on English, Spanish and
Turkish as second languages by speakers of the same languages
indicate that in addition to omission errors, there is also incorrect
spell-out of overt morphology, and these errors are not random;
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Silvina Montrul 147
rather, they are highly constrained by the way overt and non-overt
causative or anticausative morphology is realized in the L2 learners’
respective L1s. While making a contribution to the growing body
of research on the development of L2 morphology, this study refines
the claims of the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis as advanced
in Lardière and Schwartz (1997) by showing that while L2 learners
do not transfer morphophonological matrices, they do transfer the
morphophonological shape of affixes, at least initially.
II On the overt/non-overt expression of argument-structure
changing-morphology with causative verbs
This study focuses on the morphological properties of two types of
causative verbs in different languages: externally caused physical
and psychological change of state verbs. In Montrul (1999a; 1999b;
2000a; 2001) I have reported on the argument structure properties
of agentive change of state verbs and, in particular, whether L2
learners overextended the causative/inchoative alternation to
other unaccusatives, unergatives and non-alternating verbs.
Morphological errors were mentioned in explaining inaccuracy with
change of state verbs. In this article I compare part of those results
with new results of psych verbs. Throughout the article I refer to
physical change of state verbs with agentive subjects as ‘change of
state verbs’ and to psychological change of state verbs with
experiencer objects as ‘psych verbs’ for simplicity. The psychological
change of state verbs participate in the so-called
causative/inchoative alternation. Semantically speaking, they have
the complex event structure of an accomplishment (Levin and
Rappaport Hovav, 1995), where the upper event introduces the
CAUSE and the lower event represents the change of state leading
to a result (1a). For some linguists, the inchoative (intransitive) form
of change of state verbs is derived from the causative one
(transitive) by a process of detransitivization (Levin and Rappaport
Hovav, 1995) and is considered unaccusative (Perlmutter, 1978;
Burzio, 1986; Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995).
1) a. The thief broke the window
b. The window broke.
[x
[y
CAUSE [y BECOME
BECOME broken]
broken]]
The variable x stands for the agent argument, while y stands for the
theme/patient. In the transitive form, the agent maps to subject
position and the theme to object position. When there is no agent
present, as in the inchoative form (1b), the sole argument y maps
to subject position. Thus, the mapping of thematic roles to syntactic
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148 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
positions with these verbs is canonical and respects what has been
termed a thematic hierarchy. In Jackendoff’s (1990) version of the
thematic hierarchy agents are more prominent than experiencers,
and these in turn are more prominent than goals, and than themes
or patients. In recent years, the theoretical status of thematic
hierarchies for theories of lexical representation has been
questioned (see, for example, Butt and Geuder, 1998 and
contributions therein). However, as it will become obvious below,
the thematic hierarchy can explain patterns of errors in language
acquisition.
Object-experiencer psych verbs like frighten are a subclass of
change of state verbs that describe the bringing about of a change
in a psychological or emotional state.
2) The lion frightened the hunter.
[x
CAUSE
[y
BECOME
frightened] ]
According to many analyses these verbs are causative in their
transitive form (Grimshaw, 1990; Franco, 1992; Croft, 1993; Levin,
1993; Pesetsky, 1995; Parodi and Luján, 1999), but differ from
physical change of state verbs in at least two respects: (1) their
thematic role composition and (2) the linking of arguments to
syntactic positions. Psychological verbs subcategorize for a theme
(or stimulus) (x), which causes the mental state, and an experiencer
(y), the recipient of the state. In contrast with physical change of
state verbs, which have agentive subjects, psych verbs exhibit a
misalignment problem because the most prominent role
(experiencer) is mapped to a lower syntactic position (object), while
the causer is the theme (or stimulus) and maps to subject position.
Due to these argument structure characteristics, these verbs have
been shown to display peculiar syntactic behaviour with binding
phenomena, control, compounding, etc. (Grimshaw, 1990; Pesetsky,
1995). Moreover, these verbs have also been shown to represent an
important learnability challenge because, unlike the situation with
many other verbs, the mapping of thematic roles to syntactic
positions is not transparent (White et al., 1998). Sometimes input
provides evidence that experiencers are subjects (as with subject
experiencer verbs like fear), while at the same time learners hear
verbs with experiencers in object positions, and verbs of the latter
type are, indeed, more frequent in the input (Bowerman, 1990;
Talmy, 1985).
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Silvina Montrul 149
1 Morphological properties of physical change of state verbs
with agentive subjects
Haspelmath (1993) notices that languages differ greatly in their
ways of expressing the relationship between causative and
inchoative verbs with a common lexical meaning, and he
distinguishes three main morphological patterns: causative,
anticausative and ‘nondirected’ alternations (or oppositions).
Nondirected alternations are further subdivided into ‘labile’,
‘equipollent’ and ‘suppletive’, subtypes also identified by Nedyalkov
(1969).
In the causative alternation, the inchoative verb is basic and the
causative is morphologically derived. A representative example of
this pattern is found in Turkish, where the causative suffix -DIr or
any of its allomorphs attaches to the verb root to form the causative
form, as in (3b).
3) a. Gemi bat-mıs,.
ship sink-past
‘The ship sank.’
b. Düsman gemi-yi bat-ır-mıs,.
enemy ship-acc sink-caus-past
‘The enemy sank the ship/made the ship sink.’
The anticausative alternation is the opposite of the causative
pattern: The causative form is basic and the inchoative is derived.
Some verbs in Turkish belong to this pattern (4b), as do most
change of state verbs in the Romance languages, illustrated here
with Spanish in (5b). In Turkish, the anticausative morpheme -Il (or
any of its allomorphs) is also polyfunctional and homophonous with
the passive morpheme. In Spanish, the anticausative form is a
reflexive clitic se, which is polyfunctional in the language and
appears in impersonal passives as well.
4) a. Hırsız pencere-yi kır-dı.
thief window-acc break-past
‘The thief broke the window.’
b. Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
‘The window broke.’
5) a. El ladrón rompió la ventana.
‘The thief broke the window.’
b. La ventana se rompió.
‘The window broke.’
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150
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
According to Haspelmath (1993), in nondirected alternations
neither causative nor inchoative forms are morphologically derived
from each other. The labile pattern, which has non-overt
morphology in the two forms, is the most common pattern in
English, as the examples in (1) show. In contrast, equipollent
alternations have overt morphology in the causative and inchoative
forms. That is, both forms have the same lexical stem, but are
expressed by different affixes. This pattern is common in Japanese
(examples from Hirakawa, 1995):
6) a. John-ga
kabin-o kowa-si-ta
John-nom vase-acc break-trans-past
‘John broke the vase.’
b. Kabin-ga kowa-re-ta
vase-nom break-intr-past
‘The vase broke.’
Assuming Distributed Morphology, morphemes have bundles of
grammatical features and morphophonological forms. The question
that arises is what grammatical features causative and anticausative
morphemes have. For Marantz (1984; see also Miyagawa, 1980) the
anticausative affix, which attaches to transitive roots to derive an
anticausative form, carries the abstract features [–logical subject]
[–transitive], while the causative suffix carry the features [+logical
subject] [+transitive] and attaches to intransitive roots. As shown
above, descriptively speaking, languages have causative and
anticausative morphemes carrying specific grammatical features,
but vary with respect to the morphophonological spell-outs of those
features.
Finally, in suppletive alternations, different verb roots are used.
Most languages have a few verbs that fit this pattern, such as kill–die
in English, matar–morir (‘kill–die’) in Spanish, yanmak–yakmak
(‘burn’) in Turkish and sin–u/koros-u (‘burn’) in Japanese.
2 Morphological properties of psychological change of state verbs
with experiencer objects
In most languages, object-experiencer psych verbs participate in the
causative–inchoative alternation as well, although in English only a
few verbs do so (worry, gladden) (Levin, 1993). With most verbs,
however, the inchoative form is expressed periphrastically with the
verb get, as in (7c).
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Silvina Montrul 151
7) a.
The lion frightened the hunter.
b. * The hunter frightened.
c.
The hunter got frightened.
The verb get in English can also have a causative meaning. The
intransitive form is usually referred to as the passive get. However,
Haegeman (1985) argues that get is not a passive: rather, it has an
unaccusative/inchoative meaning, as the examples in (8) show.
8) a. John got his feet wet.
b. His feet got wet.
According to Haegeman’s (1985) analysis, in (8a) get assigns two
theta roles: one externally (agent) and one internally (result). In
(8b) get assigns only one (internal) theta role: result. The surface
subject NP his feet in not thematically related to get, but rather to
the lower predicate wet. His feet then raise to subject position
to receive nominative case, as in active–passive pairs,
causative–inchoative pairs, and believe vs. seem predicates.
In Spanish, morphologically speaking, psych verbs and agentive
change of state verbs are alike, conforming to the anticausative
pattern. As with agentive verbs, the reflexive clitic (se) is obligatory
in the intransitive form, as in (9b).
9) a.
El león asustó al cazador.
b. El cazador se asustó.
c. * El cazador asustó.
A commonality between Spanish and English is that transitive
psych verbs can be paraphrased with the periphrastic causative
verbs hacer (‘make’) (10a) and make (10b), respectively:
10) a. El león hizo asustar(se) al cazador.
b. The lion made the hunter frightened.
However, a difference between the periphrastic causatives in
Spanish and English is that while in Spanish hacer subcategorizes
for an infinitive (an IP), in English make subcategorizes for an
adjective (an AP). Notice that the word order is also different in
the two languages.
Although change of state verbs in Turkish belong to the causative
or anticausative pattern while most change of state verbs in
Japanese conform to the equipollent alternation, in the two
languages psychological change of state verbs exhibit the causative
alternation: the transitive form has an overt causative suffix, as
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152
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
(11a) and (12a), while the inchoative form is morphologically
simple, as in (11b) and (12b).
11) a. Arslan aucı-yı
kork-ut-mus,.
lion
hunter-acc fear-caus-past
‘The lion frightened the hunter.’
b. Aucı
kork-mus,.
hunter frighten-past
‘The hunter got frightened.’
12) a. Lion-ga ryooshi-no kowagar-ase-ta.
lion-nom hunter-acc fear-caus-past
‘The lion frightened the hunter.’
b. Ryooshi-ga kowagatta.
hunter-nom frighten-past
‘The hunter got frightened.’
To summarize, causative verbs that express a change of state
participate in the causative/inchoative alternation crosslinguistically, but the alternation is expressed differently in different
languages. The predominant morphological pattern in English with
agentive verbs is labile (no overt morphology); in Spanish it is
anticausative (morphology on the inchoative); in Turkish causative
(morphology on the causative form) for most verbs but
anticausative for many others; and in Japanese it is predominantly
equipollent (overt morphology on causative and inchoative forms).
As for psych verbs with experiencer-objects, in English and Spanish
they have overt morphology on the inchoative form (anticausative
pattern), while in Turkish and Japanese these verbs belong to the
causative pattern. These facts are summarized in Table 1.
I follow Haspelmath (1993) in assuming that the classification
into causative or anticausative does not take into account whether
the deriving element (overt morpheme) is inflectional, derivational
or syntactic. I admit that this might be an important confounding
factor, as an anonymous reviewer correctly points out.
The patterns described above are the most predominant
patterns in each language. Japanese displays the equipollent
pattern, but also has some verbs that are anticausative and others
that are causative. All languages have a handful of suppletive pairs
as well (like kill–die in English), where the two forms are lexically
distinct.
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Silvina Montrul 153
Table 1 Typology of morphological derivations with change of state verbs and
psych verbs
Morphological patterns
Causative
Anticausative
Labile
Equipollent
Spanish
Turkish
English
Japanese
+ causative
– anticausative
– causative
+ anticausative
– causative
– anticausative
+ causative
+ anticausative
kop-ar-mak
kop-mak
romper
romperse
kirmak
kir-ıl-mak
break
break
kowa-su
kowa-reru
Turkish
Japanese
Spanish
English
+ causative
– anticausative
– causative
+ anticausative
kork-ut-mak
kork-mek
asustar
asustarse
kowagar-ase
kowagar
frighten
get frightened
Change of state verbs
Languages
Turkish
Morphology
Example
(transitive)
(intransitive)
Psych verbs
Languages
Morphology
Example
(transitive)
(intransitive)
Notes: + = overt morphology; – = zero morphology
Source: Based on Haspelmath, 1993
III L1 and L2 acquisition of causative verbs
1 Physical change of state verbs with agentive subjects
There is an important body of research on the L1 acquisition of the
causative/inchoative alternation both in English (Lord, 1979;
Bowerman, 1982; Hochberg, 1986; Maratsos et al., 1987; Pinker,
1989; Braine et al., 1990; Gropen et al., 1996; Brooks and Tomasello,
1999) and in morphologically complex languages (Figueira, 1984;
Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1985; Morikawa, 1991; Berman, 1993; 1994; Pye,
1994; Allen, 1996; Borer, 1997). These studies have mostly been
concerned with the acquisition of the semantic or syntactic
constraints associated with this argument structure alternation: in
particular, whether children incorrectly overgeneralize the
alternation to other transitive and intransitive verbs that do not
alternate in transitivity. However, the acquisition of argument
structure is closely related to the morphological form of the
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154
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
alternation. For example, Bowerman (1982) has claimed that
children incorrectly make causative errors (the use of an
intransitive verb in a transitive frame to express a causative
situation) in English because the alternation is not marked overtly
on the verb. So, if break can alternate in transitivity, then children
assume that laugh or disappear can too, therefore producing errors
like *I’ll disappear something under the washrug.
However, causative and (to a lesser extent) anticausative errors
are also well documented in languages in which the
causative/inchoative alternation is morphologically expressed (for
Hebrew, see Berman, 1993; Borer, 1997; for Inuktitut, see Allen,
1996). In addition, children make systematic errors of omission or
overgeneralization of the relevant morphology as documented in
Inuktitut (Allen, 1996), Japanese (Morikawa, 1991), K’iche Maya
(Pye, 1994), and Turkish (Aksu-Koç and Slobin, 1985). For example,
in Turkish, children overapply the causative suffix to verbs that are
already causative-transitive, as in example (13) with the verb
kesmek (‘to cut’):
13) Child (2;3):
* Ben kes -tir -di -m.
I
cut caus past 1sg
‘I had someone cut it.’
intended: kesdim ‘I cut it.’)
Children also add the causative morpheme to intransitive verbs
that have a suppletive transitive counterpart (such as kill–die in
English) and do not undergo the productive causative rule, as in
(14).
14) Bu -ra -sı
-nı -*yan -dır -ıyor.
this loc poss acc burn caus prog
‘It is making this point burn.’
Also, children sometimes use an intransitive form in a transitive
context, as in (15).
15) Child:
S,u
-nu *kalk -sana.
that acc get up imp
‘Get that up.’
The child’s intended meaning was ‘lift that up’, but he used the
intransitive verb kalk (‘get up’). The grammatical form required the
causative morpheme: kal-dır-sana.
As for the passive morpheme –Il that derives the inchoative form,
Aksu-Koç and Slobin (1985: 846) notice that it emerges early ‘to
focus on desired change of state in objects’. Errors undermarking
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Silvina Montrul 155
the –Il suffix are documented with the present participle of
adjectives, as in (16).
16) * ısır-an
elma.
bite -pres -part apple
‘Apple that is biting.’
(correct:
ısır-ıl-an
elma
bite-pass-pres-part apple)
Aksu-Koç and Slobin consider the possibility that these errors
might stem from the ‘taxing operation of morphological derivation’;
however, they later conclude that they are due to insufficient
analysis of certain predicates in terms of transitivity/intransitivity,
as is also suggested by the errors of overcausativization. Allen
(1996) arrived at a similar conclusion with the errors she
documented in Inuktitut. In short, it appears that for L1 acquisition
researchers, errors with argument structure changing morphology
are taken to reflect misanalysis errors at the argument structure
level (in the mapping of lexical information to syntactic
information), rather than superficial morphological errors. Thus, as
with inflectional morphology, researchers appear to assume that
morphological errors indicate an incorrect representation of
features, and do not represent simply a failure to map features to
morphophonological form at the level of morphological structure
(MS), assuming Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993;
Harley and Noyer, 2000).
Physical change of state verbs have also been investigated in L2
acquisition, both as part of the phenomenon of the acquisition of
split intransitivity and unaccusativity in general (Zobl, 1989;
Hirakawa, 1995; Sorace, 1995; Yip, 1995; Balcom, 1997; Ju, 2000;
Oshita, 2000) and in relation to the acquisition of the semantic,
syntactic and morphological constraints on the causative/inchoative
alternation (Moore, 1993; Juffs, 1996; Montrul, 1997; Toth, 1999). In
general, L2 learners have more problems with the inchoative form
than with the causative one (Kellerman, 1978; 1985; Montrul,
1999a,b; 1999b; 2001), and it has been difficult to determine whether
these problems are lexico-semantic or morphological, or both. Like
the errors in L1 acquisition, L2 learners were also found to
overgeneralize the causative/inchoative alternation to verbs that do
alternate in transitivity, even when the alternation has –
syntactically speaking – a similar domain of application as in the
learners’ respective L1s. A common finding among many of these
studies is that L2 learners of a variety of L1 backgrounds produce
and accept errors with unaccusative verbs in passive constructions,
such as in (17) which is from Zobl (1989):
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156 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
17) My mother was died when I was just a baby. (from Zobl 1989: 204)
While some researchers have interpreted these errors as
misclassification of unaccusative verbs as verbs that alternate in
transitivity (Yip, 1995; Balcom, 1997; Montrul, 1999a; 2001), others
have suggested that these errors are strictly morphological,
suggesting that L2 learners, whose languages express unaccusativity
with overt morphology, take passive morphology as the overt
morphological encoding of NP-movement in English (Juffs, 1996;
Oshita, 2000).
In common with L1 learners, adult L2 learners make
overgeneralization errors with argument structure and with
argument structure changing morphology. While overgeneralization
errors might reflect misanalysis at the argument structure level in
the two acquisition situations, errors with the morphology are
certainly different in the two cases. Studies by Moore (1993), Juffs
(1996); Montrul (1999a; 1999b) and Toth (1999) clearly show that
the errors of omission and overgeneralization observed in L2
acquisition are constrained by the morphological patterns of the
learners’ L1s. For example, in the oral production task administered
to the participants, Juffs (1996) found that Chinese learners of
English produced more periphrastic forms (John made the ball roll
down the hill) than lexical causatives (John rolled the ball down the
hill) with locative, change of state and causative psych verbs,
presumably because CAUSE is expressed overtly in Chinese by the
verb –shi and zero-morphemes are not possible. Both Montrul
(1999a; 1999b) and Toth (1999) have independently shown that
English-speaking learners of Spanish initially omit the reflexive
morpheme in the inchoative form, accepting and producing errors
like *La ventana rompió (‘The window broke’) instead of the
correct form with the reflexive (La ventana se rompió). Montrul
(2001) shows that Spanish-speaking learners of English rejected
zero-derived forms (The window broke) and accepted inchoatives
with periphrastic get (The window got broken), which the native
speakers found more marginally acceptable than inchoatives. In
short, these morphological errors can be accounted for by the way
in which causation or change of state is morphologically encoded
in the learners’ L1.
2 Psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects
As for investigations of causative psych verbs, most studies carried
out to date have been concerned with the acquisition of the peculiar
argument structure (thematic) and syntactic properties of these
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Silvina Montrul 157
verbs in English. The few studies that report data related to
these verbs in L1 acquisition indicate that these verbs are
problematic for children as well. Lord (1979) documents errors in
which experiencers incorrectly appear in subject position with these
verbs (You keep on talking to her! And that makes me bother!
[3;11]), an error also reported by Figueira (1984) in Brazilian
Portuguese. Similarly, in an experimental study, De Guzman (1992)
found that Tagalog children who took a comprehension and an
elicited production task performed significantly more accurately in
both tasks with psych verbs with topic morphology on the
experiencer rather than with topic morphology on the theme, even
when theme topics are most common in the language. These
findings suggest that, despite the frequency of object experiencer
verbs in the input (at least in English), children make errors that
are consistent with the operation of a thematic hierarchy, which is
a presumed UG component.
These errors have received more attention in L2 acquisition, since
L2 researchers have long noticed problems with these verbs (Burt
and Kiparsky, 1972; Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1983).
Within the generative framework, White et al. (1999) investigated
the L2 acquisition of argument structure of psychological verbs such
as fear (Experiencer–V–Theme) and frighten (Theme–V–
Experiencer). Results of this study showed that French-speaking
and Japanese-speaking learners of English had difficulty with the
argument structure of the frighten class because the Theme, rather
than the Experiencer, is in subject position. Similarly, Montrul
(1998) reported that intermediate English-speaking and Frenchspeaking learners of Spanish chose the experiencer in object
position rather than the theme in subject position as the controller
of adverbial adjunct clauses (Al PROi/*j entrar en la casa, el hombrei
asustó a la mujerj ‘Upon entering the house the man frightened the
woman’). As in L1 acquisition, the learners’ tendency was to reverse
the position of these two arguments, an error suggesting the
operation of a default linguistic strategy, since learners apparently
respect the relative prominence of arguments as specified in the
thematic hierarchy.
In addition to argument structure errors, a series of studies have
also referred to the morphological properties of these verbs as
being problematic, at least in English. Using an elicited production
task with pictures, Juffs (1996) found that Chinese learners of
English at the intermediate level of proficiency were reluctant to
produce psych verbs in the lexical causative construction (The
broken vase disappointed the man) and were more likely to produce
psych verbs in the periphrastic make construction (The broken vase
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158 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
made the man disappointed) instead. (Recall that in Chinese CAUSE
is expressed by the verb shi). Assuming Pesetsky’s (1995) analysis
of the frighten class verbs as having a zero-causative morpheme that
has consequences for other areas of the grammar, such as the T/SM
restriction,1 White (1995) and White et al. (1998) wanted to find out
whether learners who had acquired the correct argument structure
for the frighten class verbs would also learn that these verbs were
bi-morphemic and that the zero-causative morpheme was related
to the T/SM restriction. Spanish, French and Malagasy learners of
English participated in the study. Malagasy has an overt causative
morpheme with these verbs and T/SM sentences are
ungrammatical; the initial assumption was that Spanish and French
also have zero-causative morphology and were assumed to behave
like English with respect to the T/SM violations. Results of a
grammaticality judgement task showed that L2 learners were
sensitive to the T/SM restriction, but there were differences among
the language groups. One of White et al.’s (1998) explanation was
that L2 learners had not realized that frighten type psych verbs have
a zero-causative morpheme in English. Following a similar line of
thought, Chen (1996) tested the acquisition of psych predicates
(including verbs, nouns and adjectives) by Chinese and French
learners of English. Her assumption was that frighten-type psych
verbs and adjectives like frightening involve a zero-causative
morpheme, while nominals like annoyance and adjectives like
annoyed do not. Chen predicted difficulties recognizing the zerocausative morpheme of frighten-type verbs and -ing adjectives.
Since nouns and -ed adjectives did not have a zero-causative
morpheme, these would be easier to learn. Results confirmed that
low-level learners had difficulties recognizing the zero-causative
morpheme in English, and this was shown in the three areas of the
grammar tested: incorrect argument structure for frighten-type
verbs, difficulties recognizing the ungrammaticality of the T/SM
restriction, and rejection of backwards binding.
What emerges from the studies reviewed above is that in L1
acquisition, researchers seem to consider errors of omission or
addition of derivational morphology as reflecting an underlying
misanalysis of the argument structure properties of the verbal roots.
In L2 acquisition, however, the opposite relationship between
1
The T/SM (target/subject matter) restriction rules out sentences that consist of a Causer,
and Experiencer and a Target/Subject Matter argument, such as (ib). Note that (ic), which
has the periphrastic causative make is fine:
i) a.
The newspaper article annoyed me.
b. * The newspaper article annoyed me at the government.
c.
The newspaper article made me annoyed at the government.
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Silvina Montrul 159
acquisition of morphology and argument structures seems to
obtain. That is, while learners also display argument structure errors
with change of state verbs and with psych verbs, and researchers
have argued that the same linguistic mechanisms as in L1
acquisition might be involved, the errors also appear to reflect
superficial problems with the ways in which the argument structure
changing morphology is spelled out in the L1 and the target
language. What none of the L2 acquisition studies have
systematically examined is whether difficulty with non-overt
morphology would extend to the two classes of verbs, and whether
overt morphology in other languages would ease the task of
learning psychological verbs, despite the misalignment problems
with thematic roles.
IV The study
This study investigates the acquisition of causative and
anticausative morphology with change of state verbs and psych
verbs in three methodologically identical experiments: L2 English,
L2 Spanish and L2 Turkish by learners whose native languages are
Spanish, English, Turkish and Japanese. I assume the basic premises
of the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis of Schwartz and
Sprouse (1994; 1996).2 According to this theory, the initial state of
L2 acquisition is the full computational system of the L1 grammar,
including all the abstract features but excluding the
morphophonological matrices of lexical and functional items. This
means that, for example, while the abstract feature [number]
transfers, learners of English whose L1 is Turkish will never
combine an English noun with the plural Turkish morpheme,
producing a word like *bookler. However, I would like to propose
that the overt/non-overt morphophonological shape of affixes carry
over from the L1 as well, and that learners are also prone to add
or omit morphology if this is dictated by their L1. The basic idea is
that if the formal features of a given morpheme are expressed
overtly in the L1 but non-overtly in the L2, L2 learners will have
difficulty with zero-morphemes and will try to find a surrogate L2specific phonological form on which to map the formal features of
2
An anonymous SLR reviewer questions why the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis is
assumed at all in this article when the full access part does not appear to play a role. The
Full Transfer/Full access hypothesis is a well-conceived theory within the generative
framework, and the results reported in this article contribute to that line of research. It is
true that the morphological errors that are the focus of this study could well be explained
by any theory of transfer. However, the full access part of this theory becomes relevant to
explain why L1 and L2 learners show sensitivity to the thematic hierarchy – a presumed
universal – when acquiring object-experiencer psych verbs.
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160
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
such a lexical item; if a morpheme has no phonological form in the
L1 but it does in the L2, L2 learners are likely to assume that such
morpheme does not have an overt form in the L2 either, at least
initially. This pattern of morphological acquisition is expected with
change of state and with psych verbs. In the presentation of each
individual study this general hypothesis will be made more precise.
However, if acquiring overt morphology in general is easier than
acquiring zero-morphology, learners should be, overall, more
accurate with causative morphology in the Turkish study than with
zero causative morphology in the English study, for instance.
Finally, in addition to showing the effects of the L1 in the type
of morphological errors observed, it cannot be denied that the
argument structure of the two verb classes plays a role in their
acquisition as well. Thus, in cases where the L1 of the learners and
the target languages match in terms of morphology, still more
difficulty is expected with transitive psych verbs than with transitive
agentive verbs in the three languages, due to the misalignment
problem of arguments to syntactic positions with psych verbs.3
These errors can be explained if L2 learners – like L1 learners –
have full access to and make errors that are consistent with the
operation of a thematic hierarchy.
1 Experiment 1: L2 English
a Participants: Participants were 18 adult native speakers of
Turkish and 29 Spanish speakers who were learning English and a
control group of 19 English native speakers. The Turkish speakers,
who were tested in Turkey, were enrolled in a low-intermediate
intensive English class at the Tömer School of foreign languages.
The Spanish speakers were adolescents taking an intermediate
English class in a private high school in Mar del Plata, Argentina,
where the testing took place. Most of these Spanish-speaking
learners also reported taking extra English lessons in private
language institutes, on top of the regular English instruction offered
at school. None of the participants in either group had lived or
spent time in an English-speaking country. The 19 native speakers
of English were tested in Montreal. Table 2 summarizes age
information per group.
3
A reviewer questions why this hypothesis should take precedence over L1 influence. In my
view it doesn’t: both morphological differences between languages and the unusual argument
structure mapping belong to two different levels of representation. Therefore, L1 influence
and reliance on the thematic hierarchy may work in tandem in interlanguage grammars (see
also Montrul, 2000a).
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Silvina Montrul 161
Table 2
English study: Participants’ information
Participants
n
Mean age
Range
Age of first
exposure
Range
Native speakers
Turkish speakers
Spanish speakers
19
18
29
24
19
15
17–40
14–22
15–17
–
12
8
–
10–19
6–12
89
16
61
83
10
b Test instruments: To try to ensure comparability of subjects
tested in different countries and institutions, a cloze test was used
as an independent measure of proficiency and was administered to
the L2 learners and the native speakers (for the validity of such
tests, see Jonz, 1990). The test consisted of a page-length passage in
English. Every sixth word in the passage was omitted, resulting in
a total of 40 blanks. Subjects were required to provide one word
per blank and the test was graded on an exact-word criterion.
A vocabulary translation task was used to ascertain the learners’
knowledge of individual English verbs before they were ready to
judge them in a given grammatical context. The rationale behind
this task is that if a person does not know the basic meaning of a
verb, then he or she might not know its syntactic behaviour. A list
of 41 verbs was presented in random order (30 of which are not
relevant to the studies presented here), which the learners had to
translate into their native language. Table 3 presents the verbs
relevant to this investigation. The verbs were presented in their
infinitive form. All those verbs that were unknown to individual
learners were excluded from subsequent analyses of their results in
the main task. Thus, results on particular verbs will only be based
on those subjects who gave an accurate translation in the
vocabulary translation task, following the same procedure carried
out by Juffs (1996) and White et al. (1999).
To see whether learners knew the transitivity and morphological
form of the verbs, a picture judgement task was designed. The task
consisted of pictures and pairs of sentences. There were two pictures
per verb: one picture illustrated the verb in a transitive situation,
Table 3 Verbs used in the vocabulary translation task and in the picture
judgement task
Change of state
Psych
open
close
break
melt
burn
sink
surprise
bore
annoy
frighten
amuse
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162
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
where an agent was doing something to a person or an object, and
the other one presented the change of state or result, where only
one participant was portrayed (see Figures 1 and 2). Participants
saw a total of 83 pictures in random order assembled in a booklet
(only 22 pairs are relevant to the results of this study). Each picture
was accompanied by a pair of sentences, presented in a separate
answer sheet. Next to each sentence in the pair there was a scale
ranging from –3 (completely unnatural) to 3 (completely natural).
All transitive pictures were accompanied by transitive sentences
and all intransitive pictures by intransitive sentences. I manipulated
the morphological and syntactic form of each verb. Since English
does not have overt causative or anticausative morphology two
verbs were used: the periphrastic verb make for the transitive
sentences, and the verb get in its inchoative use (Haegeman, 1985)
for the intransitive ones. The idea was to see whether learners
The theif broke the window.
The thief made the window break.*
–3
–3
–2
–2
–1
–1
0
0
1
1
2
2
3
3
The window broke
The window got broken
–3
–3
–2
–2
–1
–1
0
0
1
1
2
2
3
3
Figure 1 Example of pictures and sentences with change of state verbs
Note: *This sentence is grammatical but semantically anomalous in the context
provided by the picture because there is only one agent involved, instead of two
as the periphrastic construction indicates.
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Silvina Montrul 163
The lion frightened the hunter
The lion made the hunter frightened
–3
–3
–2
–2
–1
–1
0
0
1
1
2
2
3
3
The hunter frightened
The hunter got frightened
–3
–3
–2
–2
–1
–1
0
0
1
1
2
2
3
3
Figure 2
Example of pictures and sentences with psych verbs
whose language has overt morphology in the intransitive form of
alternating verbs would show a preference for this structure over
the inchoative form with zero-morphology.
Figures 1 and 2 show representative examples with the verbs
break and frighten. Depending on the verb, sometimes the two
sentences were appropriate, in other cases one sentence was
appropriate and the other was not, and yet in other cases both
sentences were either ungrammatical, or grammatical but
semantically inappropriate in the context provided by the picture
(e.g., the sentence Frank made the window break in the example
above). Participants were asked to judge both the meaning of the
sentences and their grammatical correctness in the same test,
depending on the form of the verb.
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164 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
c Specific hypotheses for the English study:
Change of state verbs: Spanish learners will be accurate with the
zero-morphology of transitive forms (The thief broke the window),
but will be inaccurate with the zero-morphology of intransitive
forms (The window broke), preferring the periphrastic get verb as
a surrogate form for the reflexive clitic in Spanish (The window got
broken).
Since both the causative and anticausative morphological
patterns exist in Turkish with change of state verbs, learners could
transfer either one of the patterns into English for all verbs, or they
could assume that those verbs that in Turkish belong to the
causative pattern (melt, sink) and those that belong to the
anticausative pattern (open, close, break) follow different
morphological patterns in English as well. That is, these learners
may assume that melt and sink are not possible with zeromorphology in the transitive form, but that open, close and melt are
possible.
Psych verbs: Spanish learners will be more accurate with the
morphology of psych verbs (which matches the Spanish
anticausative pattern) than with the morphology of change of state
verbs, if they assume that the two verb classes behave
morphologically alike in English as well.
If the Turkish learners transfer the causative pattern with psych
verbs, they will be very inaccurate with zero-derived transitive
psych verbs (The lion frightened the hunter), preferring sentences
with make instead (The lion made the hunter frightened). They will
also be inaccurate at rejecting zero-derived intransitive psych verbs
(*The hunter frightened) instead of the grammatical forms with get
(The hunter got frightened).
d Results of the English study: Cloze test: Table 4 presents the
results of the cloze test in terms of mean percentage accuracy
scores. To convert results to percentages, a score of, for example, 36
was divided by the maximum possible (40) to yield 90%. Each blank
was worth 2.5 points in percentages. The Turkish-speaking learners
performed much worse than the Spanish group. As a result, they
Table 4
English cloze test: Mean percentage accuracy scores
Language group
n
Mean
sd
Range
Proficiency
Control
Spanish
Spanish
Turkish
19
12
17
18
60
39
27
18
5.26
6.43
5.93
5.07
57.5–77.5
32.5–52.5
25–32.5
12.5–25
–
High-intermediate
Intermediate
Low-intermediate
84
79
47
83
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Silvina Montrul 165
were classified as low-intermediate. The Spanish-speaking group
was classified as intermediate. According to a one-way ANOVA,
there were significant differences between the control group and
the two groups of learners (F(2,62) = 343.118, p < 0.0001). In turn,
the two groups of learners were significantly different from each
other (Tukey, p < 0.0001). Unfortunately, this classification by
language proficiency does not allow a direct comparison of Spanish
and Turkish speakers in the main task. Therefore, any speculation
on the effects of L1 influence have to be made indirectly, by
concentrating on the developmental paths of each group
independently of each other. It can also be argued that the
Spanish-speaking learners are more proficient than the Turkishspeaking learners because there is also a significant difference in
the mean of age of exposure (Spanish = 8.12, Turkish = 12.83,
F(3,62) = 177.764, p< 0.0001). However, I checked on learners
in both groups whose age of exposure ranged from 10 to 12
(Turkish, n = 10; Spanish, n = 6) and I still found significant
differences. I conclude that the Spanish-speaking learners are
superior in proficiency to the Turkish learners, regardless of age of
exposure.
The picture judgement task: Mean responses on the seven-point
scale were submitted to a factorial ANOVA with repeated
measures, with verb (change of state vs. psych) and morphology
(zero-transitive, make, zero-intransitive, get) as the within factors,
and group (control, Turkish, Spanish-intermediate, Spanish highintermediate) as the between factor. Results revealed no main
effect for verb (F(1,61) = 2.971, p < 0.09), suggesting that there were
no overall differences between the means for change of state verbs
and psych verbs, but there was a main effect for morphology
(F(3,61) = 32.611, p < 0.017), for group (F(3,61)= 168.746, p <
0.0001), and all possible interactions (verb by group, morphology
by group, and verb by morphology by group) were significant at the
α .05 level. The overall performance of the Turkish-speaking
learners, who were at a lower level of proficiency according to the
cloze test, was significantly less accurate than the performance of
the control group (Tukey, p < 0.003), but not less accurate than that
of the two Spanish groups.
Group results of change of state verbs: Figure 3 shows the mean
accuracy scores on change of state verbs. For means and standard
deviations refer to Table 1 in Appendix 1. Results of transitive
sentences (The thief broke the window) were overall very accurate
in comparison to all the other types, but revealed significant
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166
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
3
Mean responses
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3
Transitive
Figure 3
*Transitive
make
Inchoative
Inchoative
get
English study: Mean responses on change of state verbs
differences between the control group and the Turkish-speaking
group (Tukey, p < 0.35), and between the control group and the
intermediate Spanish group (Tukey, p < 0.0001). The latter
difference was not expected in light of the hypotheses formulated,
since Spanish and English have zero-derived transitive forms.
Results of change of state verbs with the periphrastic verb make
were similar across groups, and there were no significant differences
here (F(3,64) = 1.048, p < 0.378). It was not the case that the Turkish
learners preferred the periphrastic causative (The thief made the
window break) over the zero-derived transitive form (The thief
broke the window), suggesting that they did not transfer the
causative pattern from their L1 onto English.
As for the intransitive forms (The window broke), results showed
significant differences between groups (F(3,64) = 14.213, p <
0.0001). The control group was significantly more accurate than all
the groups, but there were no differences between the two Spanish
groups and the Turkish group. The results of inchoative get were
also significant (F(3,64) = 5.611, p < 0.002), largely due to the
performance of the two Spanish groups, who rated these sentences
more acceptable than the control group and the Turkish group
(Tukey, p < 0.0001). In short, these results show that the Spanish
learners have transferred the anticausative pattern onto English, as
revealed by their rejection of zero-derived intransitive forms and
their acceptance of periphrastic get as a surrogate for the reflexive
clitic in Spanish. As for the Turkish speakers, they have clearly not
transferred the causative pattern, but they were less accepting of
zero-derived inchoative forms than of zero-derived causative forms,
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Silvina Montrul 167
suggesting that they have partially transferred the anticausative
pattern.
On failing to find that the Turkish speakers did not transfer any
one pattern from their L1, an individual item analysis was
performed to find out whether these learners might treat all these
verbs differently, since the change of state verbs used in the picture
judgement task belong to different morphological patterns in
Turkish. Figure 4 presents the results of individual verbs for this
group. As Figure 4 shows, the Turkish speakers were very accurate
with alternating verbs in the lexical causative construction. There
appears to be more variation between verbs in the periphrasticmake constructions, especially with the verb sink, which was rated
higher than the other verbs, but there was no statistical difference
between lexical items. Differences between lexical items were found
with the intransitive construction due to the verb break (F(5,83) =
2.94, p < 0.016) and with the get construction. In general, there were
no differences between the verbs that belong to the causative
pattern in Turkish (sink, melt) and those that belong to the
anticausative pattern (break, open, close) and burn, which has a
suppletive pair in Turkish. However, in the get-construction, sink
and melt were accepted as more grammatical than the other verbs,
contrary to what one would expect if these learners follow their L1
patterns; these two verbs belong to the causative pattern while
open, close and break have anticausative morphology in Turkish. In
short, the Turkish speakers do not treat individual verbs differently.
3
Mean responses
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3
Transitive
make
Intransitive
get
Figure 4 English study: Turkish-speaking learners’ responses on individual
change of state verbs
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Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
168
3
Mean responses
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3
Transitive
Figure 5
Transitive
make
*Intransitive
Intransitive
get
English study: Mean responses on psych verbs
Group results of psych verbs: Figure 5 shows the results of psych
verbs. Mean and standard deviations appear in Table 2 in Appendix
1. Results of transitive sentences (The lion frightened the hunter)
showed significant differences among groups (F(3,64) = 3.82, p <
0.014), largely due to the Turkish speakers who rejected these
sentences (Tukey, p < 0.0025), as predicted. The results of psych
verbs in the periphrastic causative construction (The lion made the
hunter frightened) was similar across groups (F(3,64) = .934, p <
0.430). Zero-derived intransitive psych verbs are ungrammatical in
English (*The hunter frightened). However, the Turkish learners
rated these verb forms grammatical, while all other groups rated
them ungrammatical (F(3,64) = 35.958, p < 0.0001). The opposite
response pattern obtained with the grammatical counterparts with
get (The hunter got frightened). Here again, the Turkish group was
significantly different from the rest (F(3,64) = 35.728, p < 0.0001)
because they rated these sentences ungrammatical. In short, unlike
the results of change of state verbs, the results of psych verbs are
very clear for the two groups, and fully confirm the hypotheses. The
Turkish speakers have transferred the causative morphological
pattern into English because they rejected zero-derived transitive
forms and accepted zero-derived intransitive forms of psych verbs.
In contrast, the Spanish speakers patterned with the control group,
since causative psych verbs in English appear to belong to the
anticausative pattern, as in Spanish.
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Silvina Montrul 169
e Individual results of the English study: To see whether the
group results obtained at the individual level, scalar data was
converted to nominal data. Individual results by subjects were
computed in the following way. If a learner had consistently
accepted 70% of grammatical sentences for each verb class and
each structure and had correctly rejected 70% of ungrammatical
sentences, then it was considered that the individual had knowledge
of the morphological patterns tested. Table 5 reports the number
of subjects per group how scored below 70% with each verb class
and structures. Individual results confirm the group results by
showing that most Spanish speakers were very inaccurate with zeroderived intransitive change of state verbs but quite accurate with
psych verbs. In contrast, most of the Turkish speakers were
inaccurate with psych verbs, particularly with the forms conforming
to the anticausative pattern: zero-derived transitive forms and
inchoative get forms.
2 Experiment 2: L2 Spanish
a Participants: Participants in this experiment were 20 native
speakers of Spanish from Argentina who acted as control, 19
Turkish speakers and 31 English speakers who were intermediate
learners of Spanish. The Turkish speakers were tested in Turkey and
were students of an intermediate Spanish class at Istanbul Technical
University. These learners knew English as well. The Englishspeaking learners were tested in Canada and the USA, and were
also enrolled in intermediate Spanish classes at their respective
universities. The learners tested in the USA were English
monolinguals; those recruited in Canada had intermediate
Table 5 English study: Number of subjects per group who scored less than 70%
accuracy with each sentence type and verb form (percentages in brackets)
Control
(n = 19)
Turkish-L
(n = 18)
Spanish-I
(n = 17)
Spanish-HI
(n = 12)
Change of state
Transitive
*make
Inchoative
Inchoative-get
0
6
0
0
(0)
(31.5)
(0)
(0)
0
3
4
13
(0)
(16.6)
(22.2)
(72.2)
0
3
9
2
(0)
(18.7)
(56.5)
(12.5)
0
4
7
2
(0)
(33.3)
(58.3)
(16.6)
Psych
Transitive
make
*Inchoative
Inchoative-get
0
0
0
0
(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)
11
1
4
12
(61.1)
(5.5)
(22.2)
(66.6)
4
3
5
1
(25)
(18.7)
(31.2)
(6.2)
2
3
0
0
(16.6)
(25)
(0)
(0)
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170 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Table 6
Spanish study: Participants’ information
Participants
n
Mean age
Range
Native speakers
Turkish speakers
English speakers
20
19
30
24.89
19.16
20.62
17–40
14–22
18–23
Age of first
exposure
12.83
13.21
Range
–
10–19
11–18
knowledge of French. In all cases, students were learning Spanish
using a predominantly communicative methodology and classes met
for 3–4 hours per week. The students tested in Canada and the USA
were using the same textbook. The Turkish students were using
materials developed by the Consulate of Spain in Istanbul.
Information about the participants in the Spanish experiment is
summarized in Table 6.
b Test instruments: The same cloze test, vocabulary translation
task and picture judgement task used in the English experiment but
translated into Spanish were used for this experiment, including the
exact same lexical items: the change of state verbs romper (‘break’),
abrir (‘open’), cerrar (‘close’), quemar (‘burn’), derretir (‘melt’) and
hundir (‘sink’), and the psych verbs enfadar (‘annoy’), sorprender
(‘surprise’), distraer (‘distract’), aburrir (‘bore’) and divertir
(‘amuse’). In the picture judgement task, the verb hacer (‘make’)
and the reflexive clitic se were manipulated with all the verbs, giving
the following sentence pairs:
Spanish version
Translation
18)
El ladrón rompió la ventana.
* El ladrón hizo romper la ventana.
‘The thief broke the window.’
‘The thief made the window
break.’
19)
La ventana se rompió.
* La ventana rompió.
‘The window broke.’
‘The window broke.’
20)
21)
El león asustó al cazador.
El león hizo asustar al cazador.
El cazador se asustó.
* El cazador asustó.
‘The lion frightened the hunter.’
‘The lion made the hunter
frightened.’
‘The hunter got frightened.’
‘The hunter frightened.’
c Specific hypotheses for the Spanish study:
Change of state verbs: Significant differences between the Turkishspeaking and English-speaking learners are expected in the picture
judgement task. In particular, English speakers will have more
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Silvina Montrul 171
difficulty with the reflexive morphology of intransitive forms (La
ventana se rompió ‘The window broke’) than the Turkish speakers,
given that the Turkish speakers have this morphological pattern
available from their L1. That is, the English speakers will prefer
zero-derived forms in the inchoative (*La ventana rompió ‘The
window broke’) instead of the correct forms with se.
Psych verbs: The Turkish speakers will be more inaccurate than the
English speakers because these verbs conform to the causative
pattern in Turkish. That is, these Turkish learners will reject zeroderived transitive forms (El león asustó al cazador ‘The lion
frightened the hunter’) and intransitive forms with se (El cazador
se asustó ‘The hunter got frightened’). The English speakers are
expected to perform like the control group, since in Spanish and
English psych verbs conform to the anticausative pattern.
d Results of the Spanish study:
The cloze test: According to the results of the cloze test, learners
were classified into different proficiency groups. The 19 Turkish
speakers were classified as intermediate. The English learners were
split into two groups: 15 intermediate and 16 high-intermediate. A
one-way ANOVA revealed significant differences between the
native speakers and the different proficiency levels (F(3,66) =
250.675, p < 0.0001). The intermediate groups were also significantly
different from the high-intermediate group (Tukey, p < 0.0001). The
means in percentages are reported in Table 7.
The picture judgement task: As in the English experiment, a
repeated measures ANOVA on the scalar data of the picture
judgement task showed no main effect for verb. However, all other
main effects (group, transitivity and morphology) and interactions
were significant at the α .05 level.
Group results of change of state verbs: Figure 6 illustrates the mean
responses on change of state verbs. Table 3 in Appendix 1 shows
means and standard deviations. All groups were very accurate with
Table 7
Spanish cloze test: Mean percentage accuracy scores
Language group
n
Mean
sd
Range
Proficiency
Control
Turkish
English
English
20
19
15
16
50.67
17.10
17.83
28.75
5.54
3.65
3.38
3.97
40.0–62.5
10.0–25.0
10.0–22.0
27.5–37.5
–
Intermediate
Intermediate
High-intermediate
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Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
172
3
Mean responses
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3
Transitive
Figure 6
*Transitive *Intransitive
hacer
Intransitive +
se
Spanish study: Mean responses on change of state verbs
transitive change of state verbs, and there were no significant
differences among them (F(3,67) = .880, p < 0.456). In addition,
results of the periphrastic construction with hacer were also similar
throughout (F(3,67) = .859, p < 0.467). With the intransitive
sentences without se (*La ventana rompió ‘The window broke’),
there were significant differences among groups (F(3,67) = 56.237
p < 0.0001), largely due to the performance of the two Englishspeaking groups who rated these sentences as grammatical. Results
of intransitive forms with se, which were also significant (F(3,67) =
18.839, p < 0.0001), display the opposite pattern: while the control
and Turkish-speaking learners rated these sentences positively on
the scale, the English speakers were much less accurate. Thus, these
results show that the Turkish group is more accurate than the two
English groups because the Turkish speakers have transferred the
anticausative morphological pattern from their L1.
Group results of psych verbs: Figure 7 displays the results of psych
verbs. (For means and standard deviations refer to Table 4 in
Appendix 1.) Results of transitive psych verbs (El león asustó al
cazador ‘The lion frightened the hunter’) are significant (F(3,67) =
8.80, p < 0.0001), because the two intermediate groups (Turkish and
English) were less accurate than the control group and the highintermediate English group, although only the Turkish group was
significantly different from the control and high-intermediate
English group (Tukey, p < 0.0001). Contrary to expectations,
however, all learner groups were very inaccurate with psych verbs
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Silvina Montrul 173
3
Mean responses
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3
Transitive
Figure 7
Transitive + *Intransitive
hacer
Intransitive +
se
Spanish study: Mean responses on psych verbs
in the periphrastic hacer (‘make’) construction (F(3,67) = 18.600,
p < .0001). My suspicion is that this result is related to the complex
syntactic properties of causative constructions in Romance (see
Montrul, 2000b).
Intransitive sentences without se (*El cazador asustó ‘The hunter
frightened’) received negative ratings by the control and Turkish
speakers, and means around the zero-mark by the English speakers
(F(3,67) = 56.237, p < 0.0001). Intransitive sentences with se (El
cazador se asustó ‘The hunter frightened’) were also statistically
different between the control and the three learner groups (F(3,67)
= 7. 091, p < 0.0001). While the Turkish learners accepted the
anticausative pattern with these verbs, results show that the English
speakers were more inaccurate at rejecting the zero-derived forms
(without se) with change of state verbs (*La ventana rompió ‘The
window broke’) than with psych verbs (*El cazador asustó ‘The
lion frightened’) (intermediate = p < 0.009; high-intermediate =
p < 0.005), presumably because English psych verbs require the
periphrastic form with get in the intransitive form (The hunter got
frightened), while change of state verbs do not.
e Individual results of the Spanish study: Individual results by
subjects, displayed in Table 8, show that more English speakers
made consistent errors with intransitive forms of change of state
verbs than with intransitive forms of psych verbs, although the error
rate with psych verbs is still quite high. More Turkish learners seem
to have problems with transitive psych verbs than with any other
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174
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Table 8 Number of subjects per group in the Spanish study who scored less
than 70% accuracy with each sentence type and verb form (percentages in
brackets)
Control
(n = 20)
Turkish-L
(n = 19)
English-I
(n = 15)
English-HI
(n = 16)
Change of state
Transitive
*hacer
*Inchoative
Inchoative-se
0
4
0
0
(0)
(20)
(0)
(0)
1
4
2
1
(5.26)
(21)
(10.5)
(5.2)
1
6
13
8
(5.26)
(40)
(86.6)
(53.3)
0
6
13
4
(0)
(37.5)
(81.2)
(25)
Psych
Transitive
hacer
*Inchoative
Inchoative-se
0
1
0
0
(0)
(5)
(0)
(0)
6
15
2
1
(31.5)
(78.9)
(10.5)
(5.2)
2
8
9
4
(13.3)
(53.3)
(60)
(26.6)
0
14
9
4
(0)
(87.5)
(56.2)
(25)
verb form (excluding the periphrastic construction with psych
verbs).
A large percentage of English-speaking individuals scored below
70% with the inchoative forms of change of state verbs. More than
80% of learners accepted zero-derived forms, while more than 50%
of intermediate individuals and 25% of high-intermediate
individuals rejected correct forms with the clitic se. The Turkish
learners were overall more accurate than the English learners. As
for psych verbs, some learners in the Turkish and the intermediate
English group had problems with transitive psych verbs, but the
percentage was higher in the Turkish group. The periphrastic
construction was problematic for the great majority of learners. Few
Turkish learners had problems with inchoative psych verbs (with se
and zero-derived), while many of the English learners had problems
with these structures. However, few learners had less problems with
inchoative psych verbs than with inchoative change of state verbs,
and this was expected because English uses the periphrastic form
with get with psych verbs.
3 Experiment 3: L2 Turkish
a Participants: This experiment tested 20 Turkish native speakers
(the control group), 18 native speakers of English, 24 Spanish
speakers and 9 Japanese speakers who were learning Turkish in
Istanbul at two institutions. Some of the subjects were living in
Istanbul and taking Turkish lessons there. All the participants were
adults. Their mean age and mean age of first exposure is illustrated
in Table 9.
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Silvina Montrul 175
Table 9
Turkish study: Participants’ information
Participants
n
Mean age
Range
Mean age of
first exposure
Range
Native speakers
Spanish speakers
English speakers
Japanese speakers
18
24
18
9
28.61
31.57
31.05
25.67
21–52
27–36
20–55
20–29
–
26.85
27.50
23.54
–
24–31
20–43
20–25
b Test instruments: These were the same as the ones used in the
Spanish and English experiments, except that they were translated
into Turkish. Due to the agglutinative nature of the Turkish
language, the cloze test had 28 blanks instead of 40. The change of
state verbs used were kırmak (‘break’), açmak (‘open’) and
kapamak (‘close’) from the anticausative pattern, and batmak
(‘sink’), erimek (‘melt’) and ölmek (‘die’) from the causative
pattern. (The verb burn was replaced by the verb die because burn
in Turkish has a suppletive pair while die belongs to the causative
pattern.) The psych verbs used were korkutmak (‘frighten’),
kızdırmak (‘anger’), eğlendirmek (‘amuse’), sevindirmek (‘please’),
and s,as,ırmak (‘confuse’). Examples of sentence pairs used in the
picture judgement task are shown in (22)–(26).
Causative pattern
Translation
22)
Gemi batmıs,.
* Gemi batılmıs,.
‘The boat sank.’
‘The boat sank.’
23)
Düs,man gemiyi batırmıs,.
* Düs,man gemiyi batmıs,.
‘The enemy sank the boat.’
‘The enemy sank the boat.’
Anticausative pattern
24)
Hırsız pencereyi kırdı.
* Hırsız pencereyi kırırdı.
‘The thief broke the window.’
‘The thief broke the window.’
25)
Pencere kırıldı.
* Pencere kırdı.
‘The window broke.’
‘The window broke.’
Psych verbs
26)
Arslan aucıyı korkutmus,.
* Arslan aucıyı korkmus,.
‘The lion frightened the hunter.’
‘The lion frightened the hunter.’
27)
Aucı korkmus,.
* Aucı korkulmus,.
‘The lion got frightened.’
‘The lion got frightened.’
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176 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
c Specific hypotheses for the Turkish study:
Change of state verbs: The Spanish speakers will be more accurate
with verbs of the anticausative pattern than with verbs of the
causative pattern. The English speakers will be equally accurate or
inaccurate with verbs of the two morphological patterns, but will
tend to accept zero-derived transitive and intransitive forms. The
Japanese learners are expected to be quite inaccurate with change
of state verbs because the equivalent translations of the verbs used
in the test have different morphology in Japanese (break is
anticausative, open and sink are causative, close and melt are
equipollent, die is suppletive).
Psych verbs: Spanish and English speakers will behave alike,
probably rejecting psych verbs with causative morphology and
accepting intransitive forms with anticausative morphology. The
Japanese speakers will be more accurate than the Spanish and
English speakers with psych verbs, transferring the causative
morphological pattern from their L1.
d Results of the Turkish study:
The cloze test: Results of the cloze test are presented in Table 10 in
mean percentage accuracy scores. Based on the overall scores, the
English-speaking group and the Japanese speakers were classified
as intermediate, while the Spanish-speaking group was split into two
different levels: intermediate and high-intermediate. There were
significant differences between the control group and the three
groups of learners (ANOVA F(4,65) = 188.45, p < 0.0001; Tukey,
p < 0.0001). The Spanish, English and Japanese intermediate groups
were not significantly different from each other, but the three
groups were significantly different from the high-intermediate
Spanish group.
The picture judgement task: A factorial ANOVA with repeated
measures revealed no main effect for verb (F(1,63) = .186 p <
0.830), and no verb by group interaction (F(8,64) = .168, p < 0.085).
Table 10
Turkish cloze test: Mean percentage accuracy scores
Language group
Mean
sd
Range
Proficiency
Control (n = 18)
Spanish (n = 10)
Spanish (n = 14)
English (n = 18)
Japanese (n = 9)
51.38
34.28
21.16
20.82
22.34
4.76
3.01
4.53
4.11
4.04
42–57
32–39
17–28
14–28
18–30
_
High-intermediate
Intermediate
Intermediate
Intermediate
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Silvina Montrul 177
3
Mean responses
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3
Transitive + *Transitive
–Dir
Figure 8
Inchoative
*Inchoative +
–Il
Turkish study: Change of state verbs of the causative pattern
All other main effects and interactions were significant at the α .05
level.
Group results of change of state verbs: Figure 8 presents the means
for change of state verbs of the causative pattern (bat-ır-mak ‘sink’
tr.; bat-mak ‘sink’ intr.). Table 5 in Appendix 1 shows the means
and standard deviations. The results of transitive forms with the
causative morpheme (bat-ır-mak ‘sink’) showed significant
differences among groups (F(4,64) = 4.952, p < 0.002), mainly
because the Japanese speakers rated these sentences less acceptable
than the other groups (Tukey, p < 0.001). Results of incorrect zeroderived transitive forms were also different among groups (F(4,64)
= 5.128, p < 0.001). In this case, the three intermediate groups
(Spanish, English and Japanese) were more inaccurate than the
control group and the high-intermediate Spanish group at rejecting
these forms. Results of zero-derived inchoative forms (bat-mak
‘sink’) were also statistically different between the control group
and all the learners (F(4,64) = 3.375, p < 0.014), and so were the
results of incorrect forms with anticausative morphology (F(4,64) =
12.716, p < 0.0001).
Results of change of state verbs of the anticausative pattern (kırmak ‘break’ tr.; kır-ıl-mak ‘break’ intr.) are displayed in Figure 9.
Table 6 in Appendix 1 shows means and standard deviations.
Results of incorrect transitive forms with causative morphology
(*kır-dır-mak) were statistically significant (F(4,64) = 4.825, p <
0.002), largely due to the responses of the English and Spanish
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178 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
3
Mean responses
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3
*Transitive + Transitive *Inchoative
–Dir
Figure 9
Inchoative +
–Il
Turkish study: Change of state verbs of the anticausative pattern
intermediate groups who were statistically different from those of
the control, Japanese, and high-intermediate Spanish groups (Tukey,
p < 0.007). Although all groups were quite accurate with zeroderived transitive forms, there were significant differences among
groups due to the performance of the English speakers, who rated
these forms lower on the scale than the other groups (F(4,64) =
3.744, p < 0.008). Results of intransitive sentences with and without
the suffix –Il were also significant (F(4,64) = 6.479, p < 0.002 and
F(4,64) = 6.398, p < 0.0001, respectively) due to the performance of
the English speakers, who were more inaccurate than the other
groups.
Group results of psych verbs: Figure 10 displays the results of psych
verbs, which belong to the causative pattern in Turkish (kork-utmek ‘frighten’, kork-mek ‘get frightened’). Table 7 in Appendix 1
shows means and standard deviations. The Spanish and English
intermediate learners failed to reject incorrect zero-derived
transitive forms, unlike the Japanese and high-intermediate Spanish
speakers and the controls (F(4,64) = 6.985, p < 0.0001), and this is
explained by transfer of their L1 morphological patterns. However,
although the results of correct forms with causative morphology
were also statistically significant (F(4,64) = 3.065, p < 0.028), the
English and Spanish intermediate groups were more accurate at
accepting grammatical forms than at rejecting ungrammatical
forms. As for intransitive psych verbs, all learner groups accepted
these sentences like the control group (F(4,64) = 1.038, p < 0.394).
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Silvina Montrul 179
3
Mean responses
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3
*Transitive Transitive + Intransitive *Intransitive
Dir
+ –Il
Figure 10
Turkish study: Mean responses on psych verbs
By contrast, the mean for incorrect forms with anticausative
morphology was statistically significant (F(4,64) = 5.293, p <
0.0001), largely due to the performance of the intermediate Spanish
and English groups.
Individual results of the Turkish study: Individual results, presented
in Table 11, show that, in comparison with the other groups, many
English speakers have problems with the three verb classes. A few
subjects in the intermediate Spanish group have more problems
with the ungrammatical forms of change of state verbs of the two
morphological patterns, while 60% of high-intermediate learners
only have problems with incorrect morphology. Finally, all the
Japanese speakers were very accurate with psych verbs, as
predicted, but few had some problems with change of state verbs,
perhaps due to the fact that change of state verbs in Japanese come
in a variety of morphological patterns.
V Discussion and conclusion
This study set out to investigate whether morphological errors with
argument structure changing morphology were unconstrained or
systematic in interlanguage grammars. Assuming the tenets of the
Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) it
was hypothesized that surface morphological errors would be
constrained by the way the abstract features associated with
causative or anticausative morphology were phonologically spelled
out in the learners’ respective L1s, such that if features were
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180
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Control
(n = 18)
English-I
(n = 18)
Japanese-I
(n = 9)
Spanish-HI
(n = 14)
Spanish-HI
(n = 10)
0
0
0
0
(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)
5
0
4
8
(27.7)
(0)
(22.2)
(44.4)
4
4
0
1
(44.4)
(44.4)
(0)
(11.1)
4
0
1
3
(28.57)
(0)
(7.1)
(21.4)
0
0
0
6
(0)
(0)
(0)
(60)
Transitive
*Transitive + -DIr
*Inchoative
Inchoative + -Il
0
0
0
0
(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)
0
6
8
4
(0)
(33.3)
(44.4)
(22.2)
0
0
2
0
(0)
(0)
(22.2)
(0)
0
3
2
0
(0)
(21.4)
(14.2)
(0)
0
0
0
0
(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)
*Transitive
Transitive + -DIr
Intransitive
*Intransitive + -Il
0
0
0
0
(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)
7
2
0
8
(38.8)
(11.1)
(0)
(44.4)
0
0
0
0
(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)
5
1
0
5
(35.7)
(7.1)
(0)
(35.5)
1
0
0
2
(10)
(0)
(0)
(20)
Change of state
Causative
*Transitive
Transitive + -DIr
Inchoative
*Inchoative + -II
Anticausative
Psych
Causative
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Table 11 Turkish study: Individual results: Subjects who scored below 70% accuracy with each sentence type and verb form
(percentages in brackets)
Silvina Montrul 181
expressed with overt morphophonology in the L1 but with zeromorphology in the L2, L2 learners would tend to find surrogate
morphophonological forms specific to the L2 to express those
features. If features were expressed with zero-morphology in the L1
but with overt morphology in the L2, learners would tend to
assume, at least initially, that those features received no
phonological content in the L2 either. This general hypothesis was
confirmed in the three experimental studies presented.4
Results of the English study revealed that the Spanish-speaking
learners rejected zero-derived inchoative forms of change of state
verbs (The window broke) and accepted more than any of the other
groups forms with get (The window got broken). Since inchoatives
have a reflexive morpheme in Spanish (La ventana se rompió),
these results show that Spanish speakers rely on the periphrastic
form with get to map the formal features [–log subject] [–transitive].
In contrast, the Turkish speakers, whose language has both causative
and anticausative patterns for change of state verbs, did not transfer
any particular morphological pattern. However, these learners were
overall more accurate with causative forms than with inchoative
forms. With psych verbs, both groups behaved according to the
hypotheses: the Spanish speakers were accurate with causative (The
lion frightened the hunter) and inchoative forms (The hunter got
frightened), while the Turkish speakers were very inaccurate with
zero-derived causative forms and inchoatives with get, preferring
transitive forms with make and inchoative forms with zeromorphology. Thus, these results suggest that they had indeed
transferred the causative morphological pattern with these verbs,
following their L1.
In common with the English study, the Spanish study also
revealed significant differences between English and Turkish
speakers with change of state verbs. Consistent with the predictions,
the English speakers incorrectly accepted zero-derived inchoative
forms (La ventana rompió), which are grammatical in their L1,
while the Turkish speakers did not. The Turkish speakers were
overall more accurate because they have the anticausative
morphological pattern available from the L1. With psych verbs, the
Turkish speakers had problems with transitive zero-derived forms
(El león asustó al cazador), although they did not prefer the
4
An anonymous reviewer disagrees with this interpretation and suggests that frequency in
the input of certain forms (such as the get structures in English) or the Turkish causative
morpheme may play a role in these transfer effects. The reviewer argues that L1 morphology
might act as an input filter, facilitating noticing when L1 and L2 are congruent, and filtering
out data where there is a mismatch. I still hold that this is transfer and what is really
transferred are the formal features and the overt/non-overt morphophonological expression
of those features.
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182 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
periphrastic form with hacer. The English speakers were more
accurate with inchoative psych verbs with se (El cazador se asustó)
than with inchoative change of state verbs (La ventana se rompió),
precisely because English requires get with most psych verbs.
Results of the Turkish study showed that in general Spanish and
English learners accepted forms with overt causative morphology
with change of state verbs and with psych verbs, even when these
verbs in their languages have zero-morphology in transitive forms.
The English learners were more inaccurate than the Spanish and
Japanese learners in accepting change of state verbs with
anticausative morphology on the inchoative form. However, despite
showing accuracy with grammatical forms, the Spanish and English
learners of Turkish were inaccurate at rejecting ungrammatical
forms. Since they accepted grammatical forms together with
ungrammatical forms consistent with their L1, these learners exhibit
optionality in their grammars. The Japanese had some problems
with change of state verbs, perhaps due to the fact that change of
state verbs in Japanese come in a variety of morphological patterns,
but were overall more inaccurate with change of state verbs of the
causative patterns than with those of the anticausative pattern. With
psych verbs, the intermediate Spanish and English groups were
inaccurate at rejecting incorrect forms without causative
morphology in the transitive form (*Arslan aucıyı korkmus, ‘The
lion frightened the hunter’) and with anticausative morphology on
the inchoative form (*Aucı korkulmus, ‘The lion got frightened’),
following their L1 patterns. The high-intermediate Spanish group
(who seemed to have overcome L1 influence with these verbs) and
the intermediate Japanese group (whose language behaves
morphologically like Turkish with these verbs) patterned with the
control group of Turkish native speakers. Thus, the predictions
based on L1 influence are largely confirmed. In cases where the L1
and L2 express the abstract features of causative or anticausative
morphology overtly, learners have little difficulty learning the
correct L2-specific morphophonological spell-outs for those
features. In cases where the L1 and L2 differ in terms of
morphological spell-outs, learners tend to behave according to what
their L1 dictates: Thus, English learners have difficulty learning
overt morphology in Spanish and Turkish, while Turkish and
Spanish learners have difficulty learning that the abstract features
associated with causative and anticausative morphology are
phonologically null in English.
Echoing the findings of Lardière and Schwartz (1997) with
morphological errors in English deverbal compounds (dish-washer),
the Spanish learners in the English study used whatever spell-out
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Silvina Montrul 183
was available in the L2 to encode the morphosyntactic features of
their representations. Therefore, they chose the verb get as a
surrogate morphological spell-out for the features [–log subject]
[–transitive] that the reflexive morpheme of inchoative forms carry
in Spanish. Similarly, the Turkish learners in the English study
preferred the periphrastic form with hacer over the zero-derived
form for causative psych verbs as a surrogate for the Turkish
causative morpheme. Although these periphrastic forms are
expressed syntactically rather than derivationally, notice that they
carry the same abstract features [± log subject] [± transitive] as the
affixes. (Embick (2000) discusses how Distributed Morphology can
account for analytic and synthetic forms derived from a common
set of abstract syntactic features.) This observation would explain
why, contrary to predictions, in his study on the L2 processing of
the morphosyntax of causative and inchoative forms, Juffs (1998)
found that Spanish-speaking learners of English did not accept
sentences with reflexive pronouns in English as counterparts of the
reflexive clitic in Romance (*First of all the chocolate melted itself
on the cake). Although the morpheme of inchoative forms in
Spanish is a reflexive clitic, the abstract features of this morpheme
with these verbs are not those of a reflexive pronoun. So the reason
why Spanish learners in the Juffs’s study did not accept itself as a
surrogate for se is perhaps because, while the translation of the
forms match, the features do not. However, Adjémian (1983)
observed that French speakers learning English incorrectly used
reflexive pronouns in English as surrogate for the reflexive clitic in
French (At sixty-five years old they must retire themselves because
this is a rule of society ‘A soixante-cinq ans ils doivent se retirer
parce que c’est une règle de la societé’). In fact, the reflexive clitic
in Spanish is polyfunctional: it has different semantic and syntactic
functions (i.e., abstract features), but the same phonological form.
However, notice that L2 learners are not always misled by this
surface similarity of affixes. What they are sensitive to is whether
the abstract features coincide. This explains why they prefer get
rather than itself as a surrogate form for the features [–log subject]
[–transitive]. In short, as already pointed out by Lardière and
Schwartz (1997) not just any phonological spell-out will do to
realize the abstract features of the learners’ representations.
While the purpose of this study was to document problems with
the morphological realizations of causative and anticausative
morphology with change of state verbs and psych verbs, and I have
largely demonstrated that the L1 indeed plays a role in this respect,
the learning problem with these verbs is not so simplistic. One
should not dismiss the fact that difficulty with transitive psych verbs
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Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
184
in particular is also due to the way in which arguments are mapped
to syntactic positions, as many studies have already documented
(see, amongst others, Chen, 1996; Juffs, 1996; Montrul, 1998; White
et al., 1998). Since the mapping of the thematic roles with agentive
change of state verbs does not violate prominence relations among
arguments, while the mapping of psych verbs does (Grimshaw,
1990), one expects learners to be more inaccurate with transitive
psych verbs than with transitive change of state verbs. If the
problem were only morphological, then learners should behave
alike with both verb classes, since transitive psych verbs and
transitive change of state verbs are zero-derived in Spanish and
English, and have causative morphology in Turkish. In fact,
individual results of the English study (see Table 5) show that no
learner was inaccurate with zero-derived transitive change of
state verbs, but 11 Turkish speakers, 4 intermediate Spanish
speakers and 2 high-intermediate Spanish speakers were
consistently inaccurate with these verbs. In the Spanish study (see
Table 8), 1 individual from the Turkish group and 1 from the English
group were inaccurate with transitive change of state verbs while 6
Turks and 2 English learners were inaccurate with transitive psych
verbs.
Figures 11, 12 and 13 display the mean scores for transitive
change of state verbs and psych verbs in the English, Spanish and
Turkish studies respectively. In the three studies there were no
significant differences between psych verbs and change of state
verbs for the control groups. However, in the Spanish and English
3
Mean responses
2
1
Psych
Change of state
0
–1
Figure 11 English study: Mean responses on transitive change of state vs.
transitive psych verbs
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Silvina Montrul 185
Mean responses
3
2
Psych
Change of state
1
0
Figure 12 Spanish study: Mean responses on transitive change of state vs.
transitive psych verbs
Mean responses
3
2
Psych
Change of state
1
0
Figure 13 Turkish study: Mean responses on transitive change of state vs.
transitive psych verbs
studies learners rated psych verbs lower than change of state verbs,
and the difference between the means was significant for the three
learner groups in the English study (Turkish: t(17) = 15.283, p <
0.000; Spanish I: t(15) = 2.324, p < 0.029; Spanish HI: t(11) = 3.129,
p < .032), but only for the two intermediate groups in the Spanish
study (Turkish: t(18) = 7.305, p < .0001; English: t(14) = 2.619, p <
0.20). Similarly, in the Turkish study, only the means of the
intermediate English and Spanish learners were statistically
different from each other (English: t(17) = 2.064, p < 0.038; Spanish:
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186
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
t(13) = 2.793, p < 0.018). In short, these results confirm that learners
at lower levels of proficiency (low-intermediate and intermediate
in this case) have problems both with the argument structure and
with the morphology of psych verbs, if the latter does not match
the morphophonological pattern of the L1. The clearest example of
this observation is the low-intermediate Turkish group in the
English study. These findings suggest that, like L1 learners, L2
learners respect the thematic hierarchy – a UG component – when
learning these verbs, thereby failing to accept experiencers in object
positions.
The final issue I would like to address is whether acquiring overt
morphology for learners whose language have zero-morphology is
easier than acquiring zero-morphology for learners who have overt
morphology in their L1. As pointed out earlier, this prediction has
been implicit in studies by Chen (1996), White et al. (1998) and
Montrul (1997). Except for Montrul (1997), who presented data
from the acquisition of morphologically different languages, the
other two studies were based on results from learners of English,
a language with zero-morphology.
The results presented in this study indicate that this prediction is
indeed confirmed. In general, we find that the Turkish speakers
have more difficulty learning zero-morphology in the English study
than English learners learning overt causative morphology in the
Turkish study. It was also found that English and Spanish speakers
learning Turkish were very accurate with the acceptance of overt
causative morphology (see Figure 11), even when the
morphological pattern of their L1 was zero for those forms. It was
also found that these learners accepted both grammatical and L1induced ungrammatical forms. This suggests that Turkish input
provides abundant clues to learners to realize that formal features
are morphophonologically spelled out; however, this realization has
not yet forced learners to abandon their L1-induced phonological
spell-out. That is why learners accepted correct forms with causative
morphology, but at the same time failed to reject incorrect forms
with zero-causative morphology. In contrast, the results of the
Spanish and English study showed less optionality.
To conclude, this study has shown that errors with argument
structure alternations can also be related to the way the alternations
are morphologically expressed. These surface morphological errors
are computational, in the sense that learners have problems
merging features and forms, rather than representational, and are
constrained by the learners’ morphophonological shape of L1
affixes. In the specific case of causative psychological verbs the
problem for learners is both with the atypical alignment of thematic
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Silvina Montrul 187
roles to syntactic positions, as several studies have documented, and
with the morphological expression of the [+log subject] [+transitive]
features in languages with zero-morphology. These findings are
consistent with the predictions of the Full Access/Full Transfer
Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996).
Acknowledgements
The data reported in this article were collected in the Summer and
Fall of 1996. I thank all the students in Turkey, Argentina, Canada
and the USA who took part in the studies, as well as Hakan Günes,
from the Tömer Institute of Foreign Languages and Antonia Panizo
from the Spanish Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, María Angélica
Damiani from the Instituto Albert Einstein in Mar del Plata,
Argentina, and Oscar Flores from SUNY Plattsburgh for their
invaluable assistance in recruiting participants for the studies. I also
thank Servet Okaçtan, Üner Turgar and Ays,e Gurel for their
invaluable assistance with Turkish at different stages of this project.
I thank Lydia White for helpful comments on earlier stages of this
work, as well two anonymous SLR reviewers for their invaluable
comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own. This
research was conducted with support from a McGill Faculty of
Graduate Studies and Research Humanities Thesis Grant to the
author and a grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada (SSHRC 410–95–0720) to Lydia White and Nigel
Duffield, for which I am grateful.
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Appendix 1
Table 1
English study: Mean and standard deviations for change of state verbs
Transitive
*Transitive make
Control
2.92
(.23)
–0.09
(1.28)
2.78
(.33)
0.22
(1.68)
Turkish–L
2.45
(.58)
–0.9
(1.64)
0.95
(1.79)
–0.33
(2.16)
Spanish–I
2.14
(.65)
–0.5
(1.50)
–0.43
(1.95)
1.83
(1.53)
–0.19
(1.51)
–0.06
(1.64)
1.69
(1.80)
Spanish–HI
Table 2
2.63
(0.48
Inchoative
Inchoative get
English study: Mean and standard deviation for psych verbs
Transitive
Transitive make
*Intransitive
2.77
(.49)
1.95
(.83)
–2.54
(.98)
2.88
(.29)
Turkish–L
–0.19
(2.19)
1.45
(1.67)
1.96
(1.45)
–1.05
(2.08)
Spanish–I
1.42
(2.05)
1.63
(1.63)
–1.37
(1.65)
2.17
(1.22)
Spanish–HI
1.8
(2.28)
1.83
(1.99)
–1.9
(1.48)
2.7
(.54)
Control
Intransitive get
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Silvina Montrul 193
Table 3
Spanish study: Mean and standard deviations on change of state verbs
Transitive
*Transitive + hacer
Control
2.77
(.51)
–1.49
(.85)
–2.81
(.38)
2.85
(.36)
Turkish–I
2.29
(.80)
–1.58
(1.56)
–2.03
(1.26)
2.37
(.84)
English–I
2.28
(.59)
–0.86
(1.55)
1.82
(1.96)
0.07
(2.13)
2.73
(1.05)
–0.82
(1.7)
1.29
(1.46)
0.88
(1.19)
English–HI
Table 4
*Intransitive Intransitive + se
Spanish study: Mean and standard deviations on psych verbs
Transitive
Transitive + hacer
*Intransitive
Intransitive + se
Control
2.42
(.79)
2.12
(1.04)
–2.64
(.68)
2.94
(.26)
Turkish–I
0.98
(.98)
–0.64
(.90)
–1.32
(1.27)
1.71
(1.27)
English–I
1.77
(1.40)
–0.62
(2.10)
0.38
(2.20)
0.93
(2.14)
2.41
(.76)
–0.96
(1.70)
–0.22
(2.11)
1.4
(1.33)
English–HI
Table 5 Turkish study: Mean and standard deviations with causative change of
state verbs
Transitive + -DIr
*Transitive
Inchoative
*Inchoative + -Il
Controls
2.88
(.33)
–2.93
(.28)
2.67
(.68)
–2.83
(.38)
English–I
2.26
(.80)
–1.2
(1.93)
1.66
(1.18)
–0.31
(1.56)
Spanish–I
2.4
(.16)
–1.35
(1.75)
1.75
(.93)
–0.44
(1.63)
Spanish–H
2.73
(.57)
–2.44
(.89)
1.8
(.97)
–0.74
(1.21)
Japanese–I
1.08
(1.72)
–0.86
(2.12)
1.88
(.93)
–0.28
(1)
Downloaded from slr.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 5, 2016
194
Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Table 6 Turkish study: Mean and standard deviations with anticausative change
of state verbs
*Transitive + -DIr
Transitive
*Inchoative
Inchoative + –Il
Controls
–2.61
(.84)
2.77
(.64)
–2.96
(.15)
3
(0)
English–I
–0.98
(1.86)
2.14
(.95)
–0.22
(2.24)
1.44
(2.11)
Spanish–I
–1.58
(1.84)
2.85
(.24)
–1.95
(1.86)
2.76
(.47)
Spanish–H
–3
(0)
3
(0)
–1.8
(1.68)
2.6
(.84)
Japanese–I
–2.27
(1.07)
2.47
(1.05)
–1.4
(1.86)
2.57
(.67)
Table 7
Turkish study: Mean and standard deviations for psych verbs
*Transitive
Transitive + -DIr
Intransitive
*Intransitive + -Il
Control
–2.7
(.53)
2.91
(.29)
2.74
(.65)
–2.88
(.30)
English–I
–0.51
(2.25)
1.84
(1.55)
2.38
(.71)
–0.48
(2.33)
Spanish–I
–0.56
(1.92)
1.86
(1.02)
2.42
(.82)
–0.79
(2.27)
Spanish–HI
–2.44
(1.18)
2.49
(1)
2.75
(.47)
-1.79
(1.45)
Japanese–I
–2.26
(.93)
2.46
(.55)
–1.8
(.79)
2.33
(.82)
Downloaded from slr.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 5, 2016