UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII LIBRARY • L2 ACQUISITION OF TRANSITIVITY ALTERNATIONS AND OF THE ENTAILMENT RELATIONS FOR CAUSATIVES BY KOREAN SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AND ENGLISH SPEAKERS OF KOREAN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS AUGUST 2005 By Jae YeonKim Dissertation Committee: William O'Grady, Chairperson Robert BIey-Vroman Kamil Deen Yuko Otsuka Ho-min Sohn Yung-Hee Kim © Copyright (2005) by Jae YeonKim 111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT It has been a long journey. It all started in 1988 when I went to Germany to further my studies. Since then, after almost two decades, I am about to close a chapter of my long "student" life. I am relieved now to be at the end ofthis long journey. Many people made it possible for me, whom I would like to thank here. First, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my advisor, William O'Grady. He always supported and encouraged me in what I was doing. Without his continuous guidance and help, especially during the final stage ofwriting up my dissertation, I could not have been able to finish it. I feel very fortunate to have had him as my advisor. I gained a great deal ofknowledge about linguistics and language acquisition through his classes. His in-depth knowledge and keen sense about Korean often made me feel ashamed ofmy limited knowledge ofmy mother tongue. I feel sorry for what he had to endure because ofmy shallow arguments and confused state ofmind while I was writing my dissertation. I learned a lot from him, but most ofall, I learned from him what a true scholar should be. His never-tiring interest in and enthusiasm about languages and linguistics has been inspiring, and that is what I wish to carry on throughout my future career. I also would like to thank Dr. Robert Bley-Vroman. He was always supportive of my studies and provided me with valuable advice whenever needed. He generously spared time to read an important part ofmy dissertation so that I could submit a draft in a timely manner. His comments and suggestions on the draft were both very helpful and important. IV I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Ho-min Sooo. His lectures about Korean widened my eyes and nourished me. His extensive knowledge about Korean was admirable, and I was fortunate to be able to sit in his classes. He was also very kind and supportive. Whenever I came by his office, he asked about my studies and my family. His genuine care about Korean students had been a great comfort for many ofthe Korean students on campus. My sincere thanks go to Dr. Kamil Deen, with whom I discussed several articles related to my dissertation while my advisor was on sabbatical. He was always helpful and encouraging in many ways. I am truly grateful for his kindness and support. I am also very thankful to Dr. Yuko Otsuka, who was always friendly and supportive. Her warmth and nice words have been a great solace. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Shuqiang Zhang. I greatly appreciate his patience with me in answering innumerable questions resulting from my limited knowledge about statistics. He never made me feel ignorant but rather encouraged me in finding out my way. He was very supportive and helpful regarding the statistical analyses for my dissertation, even during his sabbatical. I am very thankful for his generosity and understanding. Last, but not the least, I would like to thank Dr. Yung-Hee Kim, who gladly accepted to serve as an outside committee member to replace Dr. Shuqiang Zhang. I am very grateful for her kindness and support. Along the way, a lot ofpeople made my life in Hawai'i easier and bearable. I would like to thank my Korean friends in Linguistics Department, who shared their thoughts about linguistics with me and helped me by participating in my experiments. I v am grateful to Min Sun Song, Mijung Lee, In-Kyu Park, Sang-Yee Cheon, In-Sung Ko, Kyung Sook Shin, Hyekyung Hwang, Kyuseek Hwang, old and young Sunyoung Lee, Sung Sik Ahn, Jung Hee Kim, So Young Kim, Mi Sun Park, Jin-Sook Kim, Eun Hye Kim, Hye-Young Kwak, and Hee Yeoun Yoon. I am also very thankful to my other colleagues who gladly participated in my experiment. I would like to thank Meylysa Tseng for her help in recruiting subjects for me. Valerie Guerin and Mie Sanders deserve my sincere thanks because oftheir hospitality and support. I really appreciate their friendship. I should thank those who helped me to collect data for my dissertation when I was in Korea last year. My sincere thanks go to Marilyn Plumlee who recruited subjects for me. She saved me a great deal oftime and effort. Without her help, I would not have been able to conduct my experiments within such a short period oftime and without difficulty. I greatly appreciate her help and generosity. I would also like to thank those who helped me in recruiting native speakers ofEnglish for my experiments. Those in Korea, both native speakers ofKorean and English, who participated in my experiments, also deserve my heartfelt gratitude. I would like to express my deepest gratitude and sympathy especially to Fred Blair who gladly participated in my experiment in spite of his serious illness to which he later succumbed. I also would like to thank those in Hawai'i who supported me throughout my graduate years. I am very thankful to my landlord, Gene, who treated my family like his and helped us in many ways. I am also very grateful to my neighbors, Nan, Nancy, Nicole, and Neal, who were always kind and helpful. I thank them for treating my kids like their own and for loving them so much. VI My family in Korea and my in-laws in Oregon deserve my deepest thanks too. I am very grateful to my mother who had to come to Hawai'i several times to help her selfish daughter. I could never return what she had done for me. I am also very blessed to have wonderful in-laws. I thank them for taking good care ofmy son whenever I asked them to. I am forever grateful for their support and warmth. Lastly, I cannot express enough my gratitude to my beloved husband, Craig. He never complained about me studying for so long. He always stood by my side and encouraged me to do what I wanted to do. He truly deserves my heartfelt thanks. I am also very thankful to my two wonderful children, Jamin and Caelum, who were a great joy and kept me going whenever I felt down. They had to endure so much because of their selfish mother. I feel guilty for not having had enough time for them, and especially, I feel truly sorry for my daughter who has grown so much over the last few years, while I was so busy with my studies that I could not see her growing up. They also deserve my deepest thanks. I dedicate my dissertation to my husband and children who prevented me from feeling lonely by accompanying me on my long journey. It is now my turn to stay by their side. Vll ABSTRACT Recent research has claimed that the presence and/or absence ofa morphological marking ofcausative/inchoative verbs in the learners' respective native language results in difficulty in the acquisition ofthese verbs in languages such as English, Spanish, and Turkish (MontruI1999; 2000; 2001). My dissertation investigates this issue in the speech ofKorean learners ofEnglish (ESL) and English-speaking learners ofKorean (KSL). In English the causative and inchoative verbs used in the transitive and intransitive constructions, respectively, have the same morphological form. Unlike English, however, in Korean the alternation is marked by morphologically related rather than identical forms ofthe verb in the transitive and intransitive constructions. Based on the differences in morphological marking ofthe causative/inchoative verbs between English and Korean, it is expected that L2 learners would show difficulty identifying these verbs where the two languages differ in terms ofmarking them. In the study at hand, however, a pattern-based transferaccount was put forward to explain the ESL learners' performance because a class-based transfer effect involving morphological properties proposed by Montrul (2001 b) was not readily observed. In addition, the notion ofa prototypical transitive event was proposed to account for the KSL learners' performance because they did not appear to have transferred a general pattern from their L1 in identifying alternating unaccusative verbs in Korean. Results concerning another experiment, which investigated the L2 acquisition of entailment relations associated with lexical/morphological and syntactic causatives show V111 that both ESL and KSL learners seem to have transferred the entailment relations from their Ll in identifying these causatives in the L2. The reason that the findings in this study were different from Montrul's might lie in the fact that the learners who participated in this study might not be "true" beginner­ level learners. My dissertation could contribute to determining which linguistic areas are more likely to transfer; for example, the domain ofsemantics (which includes entailment relations) seems to be one ofthe linguistic areas which is more prone to transfer from the LIto the interlanguage grammar. IX TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgement. .iv Abstract viii List ofTables xiii LIst. 0 fF'19ures XVll.. List ofAbbreviations xviii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 1.1. Transitivity Alternations l 1.2. Entailment Relations for Causatives .4 1.3.