The acquisition of English unaccusative verbs by Arabic native speakers

Abstract

This study examined the acquisition of English unaccusatives by low, intermediate, and advanced Arabic learners of English using a grammaticality judgment task. The study tested two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis (UTH) (Oshita 2001), which claims that L2 early learners first treat unaccusatives as unergatives. At a later stage, learners begin to restructure their grammar and treat the two classes differently. At a final stage, learners behave like native speakers. The results showed that the early learners did not treat unaccusatives as unergatives as the UTH claims. The intermediate treated the two classes differently, and the advanced behaved to some extent like the native speakers. The second hypothesis tested in the study is the Unaccusativity Hierarchy Hypothesis (UHH) (Sorace 2000), which claims that there is a universal semantic hierarchy for unaccusatives and unergatives. The results showed that the native speakers were sensitive to the hierarchy, a result which lends further empirical support to Sorace's hierarchy. The learners did not show much sensitivity to the hierarchy. We believe the reason is that the morphological reflexes of unaccusativity in English are not so clear in the input, suggesting that morphosyntactic properties of the target language may influence learners' sensitivity to the hierarchy.