First-language-constrained variabilityin the second-language acquisition ofargument-structure-changingmorphology with causative verbsSilvina Montrul University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This article presents three related experiments on the acquisition of twoclasses of causative verbs: physical change of state verbs with agentivesubjects (e.g., English break) and psychological change of state verbs withexperiencer objects (e.g., English frighten) in English, Spanish and Turkishas second languages by speakers whose native languages are English,Spanish, Turkish and Japanese. These verbs participate in thecausative/inchoative alternation crosslinguistically, but the morphologicalexpression of the alternation varies in the four languages. English haspredominantly zero-morphology, Spanish has anticausative morphology, andTurkish and Japanese both have causative and anticausative morphology.Assuming the tenets of the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartzand Sprouse, 1996), results of a picture judgement task testing transitive andintransitive sentences and manipulating overt/non-overt morphology on theverbs show that morphological errors in the three languages are constrainedby the morphological patterns of the learners’ first language (L1s). Inaddition to showing that formal features of morphemes transfer butmorphophonological matrices do not, this study refines the role of L1influence in the morphological domain by showing that themorphophonological shape of affixes transfers as well.
I Morphology in second-language acquisition
It has long been observed that, among the different component oflinguistic knowledge, morphology is perhaps the most fragile duringsecond 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 morphologyis not processed when making sense of input (van Patten, 1996),and variability in the production of inflectional morphology – suchas 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 andPortuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4080 Foreign Languages Building,MC-176, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; email: [email protected]
Second Language Research 17,2 (2001); pp. 144–194
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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 itscontent (i.e., syntactico-semantic abstract features drawn from theset made available by Universal Grammar), and not to thephonological expression of that terminal node. L-morphemesdenote language specific concepts. L-morphemes and f-morphemesrepresent the distinction between open class and closed class lexicalitems. The traditional distinction between inflectional andderivational morphology is blurred in this framework. Thus, Iassume that the argument structure changing morphemes that arethe focus of this article are also f-morphemes. The phonologicalcontent of a vocabulary item may be any phonological string,including zero (or Ø). This view is also implicit in the MinimalistProgram (Chomsky, 1995), where functional categories (DP, CP,AgrP and TP) have abstract formal features that drive syntacticmovement. 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 thesefeatures are morphologically expressed by the –ed affix or any ofits allomorphs. Phonological spell-outs, insertion of lexical itemsand readjustment rules occur post-syntactically, at the level ofMorphological Form (MS).
This separation between formal features and phonological spell-outs has taken centre stage in debates on the full availability ofUniversal Grammar (UG) in the L2 acquisition of morphosyntaxand morphophonology. For example, in attempting to provide aprincipled account of why learners systematically fail to producemorphology, a number of researchers have argued that L2 learnershave ‘full competence’ with respect to functional categories, andthat variability in the use of L2 inflectional morphology is due tosurface morphophonological, rather than to abstract-featural,problems (Epstein, et al., 1996, Grondin and White, 1996; Haznedarand Schwartz 1997; Lardière and Schwartz 1997; Lardière, 1998a;1998b; Prévost and White 1999; 2000). According to the FullTransfer/Full Access Hypothesis of Schwartz and Sprouse (1996)this is possible because abstract features transfer in full from thefirst language (L1), but the morphophonological matrices do not.It is therefore not surprising that L2 learners have problems withthe assembly, or computation (i.e., the operations Merge and Move;Chomsky, 1995), of mapping formal features to language specific
morphophonological forms. In contrast with the above view thatplaces 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 tothe interlanguage grammar in the domain of the abstract features,such that errors with morphology are indicative of deeper deficitsin linguistic knowledge (i.e., are a representational problem).
This study further pursues the idea that L2 learners haveproblems with the overt realization of morphology, and defends theposition that the problem is morphophonological. In the spirit ofLardière and Schwartz (1997), this work is specifically concernedwith the role of the first language on the mapping of formal featuresto morphophonological spell-outs. The focus of this investigation ison argument structure changing morphology, an area that seems tobe problematic for L2 learners as well, at least at initial stages.Motivation for the present investigation comes from theobservation emerging from studies on object-experiencer psychverbs (e.g., frighten): That in addition to a misalignment of thematicroles to syntactic positions with these verbs – an issue that I makemore precise below – learners have difficulties realizing that theseverbs have a zero-causative morpheme in English (Chen, 1996;White et al., 1998). However, if zero-causative morphology isproblematic with psych verbs, it ought to be problematic with othercausative verbs as well, and a series of studies on the argumentstructure 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 lineof thought is that overt morphology should be easier to learn thanzero-morphology. To test these predictions this study focuses on acomparison of the L2 acquisition of the morphological patterns ofcausative verbs that denote a physical change of state and haveagentive subjects (e.g., break, melt) and psychological change ofstate verbs with experiencer objects (e.g., frighten, bore), whichaccording to Pesetsky (1995) have zero-causative morphology inEnglish. By contrast, in Spanish, Turkish and Japanese these verbshave overt causative and/or anticausative morphology. In commonwith existing research investigating inflectional morphologyassociated with functional categories, this study asks whethermorphological errors are unconstrained or predictable ininterlanguage grammars.
The results of three experimental studies on English, Spanish andTurkish as second languages by speakers of the same languagesindicate that in addition to omission errors, there is also incorrectspell-out of overt morphology, and these errors are not random;
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rather, they are highly constrained by the way overt and non-overtcausative or anticausative morphology is realized in the L2 learners’respective L1s. While making a contribution to the growing bodyof research on the development of L2 morphology, this study refinesthe claims of the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis as advancedin Lardière and Schwartz (1997) by showing that while L2 learnersdo not transfer morphophonological matrices, they do transfer themorphophonological shape of affixes, at least initially.
II On the overt/non-overt expression of argument-structurechanging-morphology with causative verbs
This study focuses on the morphological properties of two types ofcausative verbs in different languages: externally caused physicaland psychological change of state verbs. In Montrul (1999a; 1999b;2000a; 2001) I have reported on the argument structure propertiesof agentive change of state verbs and, in particular, whether L2learners overextended the causative/inchoative alternation toother unaccusatives, unergatives and non-alternating verbs.Morphological errors were mentioned in explaining inaccuracy withchange of state verbs. In this article I compare part of those resultswith new results of psych verbs. Throughout the article I refer tophysical change of state verbs with agentive subjects as ‘change ofstate verbs’ and to psychological change of state verbs withexperiencer objects as ‘psych verbs’ for simplicity. The psychologicalchange of state verbs participate in the so-calledcausative/inchoative alternation. Semantically speaking, they havethe complex event structure of an accomplishment (Levin andRappaport Hovav, 1995), where the upper event introduces theCAUSE and the lower event represents the change of state leadingto a result (1a). For some linguists, the inchoative (intransitive) formof change of state verbs is derived from the causative one(transitive) by a process of detransitivization (Levin and RappaportHovav, 1995) and is considered unaccusative (Perlmutter, 1978;Burzio, 1986; Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995).
1) a. The thief broke the window [x CAUSE [y BECOME broken]]b. The window broke. [y BECOME broken]
The variable x stands for the agent argument, while y stands for thetheme/patient. In the transitive form, the agent maps to subjectposition and the theme to object position. When there is no agentpresent, as in the inchoative form (1b), the sole argument y mapsto subject position. Thus, the mapping of thematic roles to syntactic
positions with these verbs is canonical and respects what has beentermed a thematic hierarchy. In Jackendoff’s (1990) version of thethematic hierarchy agents are more prominent than experiencers,and these in turn are more prominent than goals, and than themesor patients. In recent years, the theoretical status of thematichierarchies for theories of lexical representation has beenquestioned (see, for example, Butt and Geuder, 1998 andcontributions therein). However, as it will become obvious below,the thematic hierarchy can explain patterns of errors in languageacquisition.
Object-experiencer psych verbs like frighten are a subclass ofchange of state verbs that describe the bringing about of a changein 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 theirtransitive form (Grimshaw, 1990; Franco, 1992; Croft, 1993; Levin,1993; Pesetsky, 1995; Parodi and Luján, 1999), but differ fromphysical change of state verbs in at least two respects: (1) theirthematic role composition and (2) the linking of arguments tosyntactic 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 ofstate verbs, which have agentive subjects, psych verbs exhibit amisalignment problem because the most prominent role(experiencer) is mapped to a lower syntactic position (object), whilethe causer is the theme (or stimulus) and maps to subject position.Due to these argument structure characteristics, these verbs havebeen shown to display peculiar syntactic behaviour with bindingphenomena, control, compounding, etc. (Grimshaw, 1990; Pesetsky,1995). Moreover, these verbs have also been shown to represent animportant learnability challenge because, unlike the situation withmany other verbs, the mapping of thematic roles to syntacticpositions is not transparent (White et al., 1998). Sometimes inputprovides evidence that experiencers are subjects (as with subjectexperiencer verbs like fear), while at the same time learners hearverbs with experiencers in object positions, and verbs of the lattertype are, indeed, more frequent in the input (Bowerman, 1990;Talmy, 1985).
148 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
1 Morphological properties of physical change of state verbswith agentive subjects
Haspelmath (1993) notices that languages differ greatly in theirways of expressing the relationship between causative andinchoative verbs with a common lexical meaning, and hedistinguishes 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 thecausative is morphologically derived. A representative example ofthis pattern is found in Turkish, where the causative suffix -DIr orany of its allomorphs attaches to the verb root to form the causativeform, 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 causativepattern: The causative form is basic and the inchoative is derived.Some verbs in Turkish belong to this pattern (4b), as do mostchange of state verbs in the Romance languages, illustrated herewith Spanish in (5b). In Turkish, the anticausative morpheme -Il (orany of its allomorphs) is also polyfunctional and homophonous withthe passive morpheme. In Spanish, the anticausative form is areflexive clitic se, which is polyfunctional in the language andappears 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-dıwindow 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 alternationsneither causative nor inchoative forms are morphologically derivedfrom each other. The labile pattern, which has non-overtmorphology in the two forms, is the most common pattern inEnglish, as the examples in (1) show. In contrast, equipollentalternations have overt morphology in the causative and inchoativeforms. That is, both forms have the same lexical stem, but areexpressed by different affixes. This pattern is common in Japanese(examples from Hirakawa, 1995):
6) a. John-ga kabin-o kowa-si-taJohn-nom vase-acc break-trans-past‘John broke the vase.’
b. Kabin-ga kowa-re-tavase-nom break-intr-past‘The vase broke.’
Assuming Distributed Morphology, morphemes have bundles ofgrammatical features and morphophonological forms. The questionthat arises is what grammatical features causative and anticausativemorphemes have. For Marantz (1984; see also Miyagawa, 1980) theanticausative affix, which attaches to transitive roots to derive ananticausative form, carries the abstract features [–logical subject][–transitive], while the causative suffix carry the features [+logicalsubject] [+transitive] and attaches to intransitive roots. As shownabove, descriptively speaking, languages have causative andanticausative morphemes carrying specific grammatical features,but vary with respect to the morphophonological spell-outs of thosefeatures.
Finally, in suppletive alternations, different verb roots are used.Most languages have a few verbs that fit this pattern, such as kill–diein 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 verbswith experiencer objects
In most languages, object-experiencer psych verbs participate in thecausative–inchoative alternation as well, although in English only afew verbs do so (worry, gladden) (Levin, 1993). With most verbs,however, the inchoative form is expressed periphrastically with theverb get, as in (7c).
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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. Theintransitive form is usually referred to as the passive get. However,Haegeman (1985) argues that get is not a passive: rather, it has anunaccusative/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 twotheta roles: one externally (agent) and one internally (result). In(8b) get assigns only one (internal) theta role: result. The surfacesubject NP his feet in not thematically related to get, but rather tothe lower predicate wet. His feet then raise to subject positionto receive nominative case, as in active–passive pairs,causative–inchoative pairs, and believe vs. seem predicates.
In Spanish, morphologically speaking, psych verbs and agentivechange of state verbs are alike, conforming to the anticausativepattern. As with agentive verbs, the reflexive clitic (se) is obligatoryin 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 transitivepsych verbs can be paraphrased with the periphrastic causativeverbs 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 inSpanish and English is that while in Spanish hacer subcategorizesfor an infinitive (an IP), in English make subcategorizes for anadjective (an AP). Notice that the word order is also different inthe two languages.
Although change of state verbs in Turkish belong to the causativeor anticausative pattern while most change of state verbs inJapanese conform to the equipollent alternation, in the twolanguages psychological change of state verbs exhibit the causativealternation: the transitive form has an overt causative suffix, as
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(11a) and (12a), while the inchoative form is morphologicallysimple, 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 stateparticipate in the causative/inchoative alternation cross-linguistically, but the alternation is expressed differently in differentlanguages. The predominant morphological pattern in English withagentive verbs is labile (no overt morphology); in Spanish it isanticausative (morphology on the inchoative); in Turkish causative(morphology on the causative form) for most verbs butanticausative for many others; and in Japanese it is predominantlyequipollent (overt morphology on causative and inchoative forms).As for psych verbs with experiencer-objects, in English and Spanishthey have overt morphology on the inchoative form (anticausativepattern), while in Turkish and Japanese these verbs belong to thecausative pattern. These facts are summarized in Table 1.
I follow Haspelmath (1993) in assuming that the classificationinto causative or anticausative does not take into account whetherthe deriving element (overt morpheme) is inflectional, derivationalor syntactic. I admit that this might be an important confoundingfactor, as an anonymous reviewer correctly points out.
The patterns described above are the most predominantpatterns in each language. Japanese displays the equipollentpattern, but also has some verbs that are anticausative and othersthat are causative. All languages have a handful of suppletive pairsas well (like kill–die in English), where the two forms are lexicallydistinct.
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 thecausative/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 beenconcerned with the acquisition of the semantic or syntacticconstraints associated with this argument structure alternation: inparticular, whether children incorrectly overgeneralize thealternation to other transitive and intransitive verbs that do notalternate in transitivity. However, the acquisition of argumentstructure is closely related to the morphological form of the
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Table 1 Typology of morphological derivations with change of state verbs andpsych verbs
Morphological patterns
Causative Anticausative Labile Equipollent
Change of state verbsLanguages Turkish Spanish English Japanese
Notes: + = overt morphology; – = zero morphologySource: Based on Haspelmath, 1993
alternation. For example, Bowerman (1982) has claimed thatchildren incorrectly make causative errors (the use of anintransitive verb in a transitive frame to express a causativesituation) in English because the alternation is not marked overtlyon the verb. So, if break can alternate in transitivity, then childrenassume that laugh or disappear can too, therefore producing errorslike *I’ll disappear something under the washrug.
However, causative and (to a lesser extent) anticausative errorsare also well documented in languages in which thecausative/inchoative alternation is morphologically expressed (forHebrew, see Berman, 1993; Borer, 1997; for Inuktitut, see Allen,1996). In addition, children make systematic errors of omission orovergeneralization of the relevant morphology as documented inInuktitut (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 arealready causative-transitive, as in example (13) with the verbkesmek (‘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 verbsthat have a suppletive transitive counterpart (such as kill–die inEnglish) 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 transitivecontext, 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 theintransitive verb kalk (‘get up’). The grammatical form required thecausative 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 ‘tofocus on desired change of state in objects’. Errors undermarking
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the –Il suffix are documented with the present participle ofadjectives, as in (16).
16) * ısır-an elma. (correct: ısır-ıl-an elmabite -pres -part apple bite-pass-pres-part apple)‘Apple that is biting.’
Aksu-Koç and Slobin consider the possibility that these errorsmight stem from the ‘taxing operation of morphological derivation’;however, they later conclude that they are due to insufficientanalysis 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 shedocumented in Inuktitut. In short, it appears that for L1 acquisitionresearchers, errors with argument structure changing morphologyare taken to reflect misanalysis errors at the argument structurelevel (in the mapping of lexical information to syntacticinformation), rather than superficial morphological errors. Thus, aswith inflectional morphology, researchers appear to assume thatmorphological errors indicate an incorrect representation offeatures, and do not represent simply a failure to map features tomorphophonological 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 L2acquisition, both as part of the phenomenon of the acquisition ofsplit 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/inchoativealternation (Moore, 1993; Juffs, 1996; Montrul, 1997; Toth, 1999). Ingeneral, L2 learners have more problems with the inchoative formthan with the causative one (Kellerman, 1978; 1985; Montrul,1999a,b; 1999b; 2001), and it has been difficult to determine whetherthese problems are lexico-semantic or morphological, or both. Likethe errors in L1 acquisition, L2 learners were also found toovergeneralize the causative/inchoative alternation to verbs that doalternate in transitivity, even when the alternation has –syntactically speaking – a similar domain of application as in thelearners’ respective L1s. A common finding among many of thesestudies is that L2 learners of a variety of L1 backgrounds produceand accept errors with unaccusative verbs in passive constructions,such as in (17) which is from Zobl (1989):
17) My mother was died when I was just a baby. (from Zobl 1989: 204)
While some researchers have interpreted these errors asmisclassification of unaccusative verbs as verbs that alternate intransitivity (Yip, 1995; Balcom, 1997; Montrul, 1999a; 2001), othershave suggested that these errors are strictly morphological,suggesting that L2 learners, whose languages express unaccusativitywith overt morphology, take passive morphology as the overtmorphological encoding of NP-movement in English (Juffs, 1996;Oshita, 2000).
In common with L1 learners, adult L2 learners makeovergeneralization errors with argument structure and withargument structure changing morphology. While overgeneralizationerrors might reflect misanalysis at the argument structure level inthe two acquisition situations, errors with the morphology arecertainly different in the two cases. Studies by Moore (1993), Juffs(1996); Montrul (1999a; 1999b) and Toth (1999) clearly show thatthe errors of omission and overgeneralization observed in L2acquisition are constrained by the morphological patterns of thelearners’ L1s. For example, in the oral production task administeredto the participants, Juffs (1996) found that Chinese learners ofEnglish produced more periphrastic forms (John made the ball rolldown the hill) than lexical causatives (John rolled the ball down thehill) with locative, change of state and causative psych verbs,presumably because CAUSE is expressed overtly in Chinese by theverb –shi and zero-morphemes are not possible. Both Montrul(1999a; 1999b) and Toth (1999) have independently shown thatEnglish-speaking learners of Spanish initially omit the reflexivemorpheme in the inchoative form, accepting and producing errorslike *La ventana rompió (‘The window broke’) instead of thecorrect form with the reflexive (La ventana se rompió). Montrul(2001) shows that Spanish-speaking learners of English rejectedzero-derived forms (The window broke) and accepted inchoativeswith periphrastic get (The window got broken), which the nativespeakers found more marginally acceptable than inchoatives. Inshort, these morphological errors can be accounted for by the wayin which causation or change of state is morphologically encodedin the learners’ L1.
2 Psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects
As for investigations of causative psych verbs, most studies carriedout to date have been concerned with the acquisition of the peculiarargument structure (thematic) and syntactic properties of these
156 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
verbs in English. The few studies that report data related tothese verbs in L1 acquisition indicate that these verbs areproblematic for children as well. Lord (1979) documents errors inwhich experiencers incorrectly appear in subject position with theseverbs (You keep on talking to her! And that makes me bother![3;11]), an error also reported by Figueira (1984) in BrazilianPortuguese. Similarly, in an experimental study, De Guzman (1992)found that Tagalog children who took a comprehension and anelicited production task performed significantly more accurately inboth tasks with psych verbs with topic morphology on theexperiencer rather than with topic morphology on the theme, evenwhen theme topics are most common in the language. Thesefindings suggest that, despite the frequency of object experiencerverbs in the input (at least in English), children make errors thatare consistent with the operation of a thematic hierarchy, which isa presumed UG component.
These errors have received more attention in L2 acquisition, sinceL2 researchers have long noticed problems with these verbs (Burtand Kiparsky, 1972; Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1983).Within the generative framework, White et al. (1999) investigatedthe L2 acquisition of argument structure of psychological verbs suchas fear (Experiencer–V–Theme) and frighten (Theme–V–Experiencer). Results of this study showed that French-speakingand Japanese-speaking learners of English had difficulty with theargument structure of the frighten class because the Theme, ratherthan the Experiencer, is in subject position. Similarly, Montrul(1998) reported that intermediate English-speaking and French-speaking learners of Spanish chose the experiencer in objectposition rather than the theme in subject position as the controllerof adverbial adjunct clauses (Al PROi/*j entrar en la casa, el hombreiasustó a la mujerj ‘Upon entering the house the man frightened thewoman’). As in L1 acquisition, the learners’ tendency was to reversethe position of these two arguments, an error suggesting theoperation of a default linguistic strategy, since learners apparentlyrespect the relative prominence of arguments as specified in thethematic hierarchy.
In addition to argument structure errors, a series of studies havealso referred to the morphological properties of these verbs asbeing problematic, at least in English. Using an elicited productiontask with pictures, Juffs (1996) found that Chinese learners ofEnglish at the intermediate level of proficiency were reluctant toproduce psych verbs in the lexical causative construction (Thebroken vase disappointed the man) and were more likely to producepsych verbs in the periphrastic make construction (The broken vase
Silvina Montrul 157
made the man disappointed) instead. (Recall that in Chinese CAUSEis expressed by the verb shi). Assuming Pesetsky’s (1995) analysisof the frighten class verbs as having a zero-causative morpheme thathas consequences for other areas of the grammar, such as the T/SMrestriction,1 White (1995) and White et al. (1998) wanted to find outwhether learners who had acquired the correct argument structurefor the frighten class verbs would also learn that these verbs werebi-morphemic and that the zero-causative morpheme was relatedto the T/SM restriction. Spanish, French and Malagasy learners ofEnglish participated in the study. Malagasy has an overt causativemorpheme with these verbs and T/SM sentences areungrammatical; the initial assumption was that Spanish and Frenchalso have zero-causative morphology and were assumed to behavelike English with respect to the T/SM violations. Results of agrammaticality judgement task showed that L2 learners weresensitive to the T/SM restriction, but there were differences amongthe language groups. One of White et al.’s (1998) explanation wasthat L2 learners had not realized that frighten type psych verbs havea zero-causative morpheme in English. Following a similar line ofthought, Chen (1996) tested the acquisition of psych predicates(including verbs, nouns and adjectives) by Chinese and Frenchlearners of English. Her assumption was that frighten-type psychverbs and adjectives like frightening involve a zero-causativemorpheme, while nominals like annoyance and adjectives likeannoyed do not. Chen predicted difficulties recognizing the zero-causative morpheme of frighten-type verbs and -ing adjectives.Since nouns and -ed adjectives did not have a zero-causativemorpheme, these would be easier to learn. Results confirmed thatlow-level learners had difficulties recognizing the zero-causativemorpheme in English, and this was shown in the three areas of thegrammar tested: incorrect argument structure for frighten-typeverbs, difficulties recognizing the ungrammaticality of the T/SMrestriction, and rejection of backwards binding.
What emerges from the studies reviewed above is that in L1acquisition, researchers seem to consider errors of omission oraddition of derivational morphology as reflecting an underlyingmisanalysis of the argument structure properties of the verbal roots.In L2 acquisition, however, the opposite relationship between
158 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
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), whichhas 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.
acquisition of morphology and argument structures seems toobtain. That is, while learners also display argument structure errorswith change of state verbs and with psych verbs, and researchershave argued that the same linguistic mechanisms as in L1acquisition might be involved, the errors also appear to reflectsuperficial problems with the ways in which the argument structurechanging morphology is spelled out in the L1 and the targetlanguage. What none of the L2 acquisition studies havesystematically examined is whether difficulty with non-overtmorphology would extend to the two classes of verbs, and whetherovert morphology in other languages would ease the task oflearning psychological verbs, despite the misalignment problemswith thematic roles.
IV The study
This study investigates the acquisition of causative andanticausative morphology with change of state verbs and psychverbs in three methodologically identical experiments: L2 English,L2 Spanish and L2 Turkish by learners whose native languages areSpanish, English, Turkish and Japanese. I assume the basic premisesof the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis of Schwartz andSprouse (1994; 1996).2 According to this theory, the initial state ofL2 acquisition is the full computational system of the L1 grammar,including all the abstract features but excluding themorphophonological matrices of lexical and functional items. Thismeans that, for example, while the abstract feature [number]transfers, learners of English whose L1 is Turkish will nevercombine an English noun with the plural Turkish morpheme,producing a word like *bookler. However, I would like to proposethat the overt/non-overt morphophonological shape of affixes carryover from the L1 as well, and that learners are also prone to addor omit morphology if this is dictated by their L1. The basic idea isthat if the formal features of a given morpheme are expressedovertly in the L1 but non-overtly in the L2, L2 learners will havedifficulty with zero-morphemes and will try to find a surrogate L2-specific phonological form on which to map the formal features of
Silvina Montrul 159
2 An anonymous SLR reviewer questions why the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis isassumed at all in this article when the full access part does not appear to play a role. TheFull Transfer/Full access hypothesis is a well-conceived theory within the generativeframework, and the results reported in this article contribute to that line of research. It istrue that the morphological errors that are the focus of this study could well be explainedby any theory of transfer. However, the full access part of this theory becomes relevant toexplain why L1 and L2 learners show sensitivity to the thematic hierarchy – a presumeduniversal – when acquiring object-experiencer psych verbs.
such a lexical item; if a morpheme has no phonological form in theL1 but it does in the L2, L2 learners are likely to assume that suchmorpheme does not have an overt form in the L2 either, at leastinitially. This pattern of morphological acquisition is expected withchange of state and with psych verbs. In the presentation of eachindividual study this general hypothesis will be made more precise.
However, if acquiring overt morphology in general is easier thanacquiring zero-morphology, learners should be, overall, moreaccurate with causative morphology in the Turkish study than withzero causative morphology in the English study, for instance.
Finally, in addition to showing the effects of the L1 in the typeof morphological errors observed, it cannot be denied that theargument structure of the two verb classes plays a role in theiracquisition as well. Thus, in cases where the L1 of the learners andthe target languages match in terms of morphology, still moredifficulty is expected with transitive psych verbs than with transitiveagentive verbs in the three languages, due to the misalignmentproblem of arguments to syntactic positions with psych verbs.3These errors can be explained if L2 learners – like L1 learners –have full access to and make errors that are consistent with theoperation of a thematic hierarchy.
1 Experiment 1: L2 English
a Participants: Participants were 18 adult native speakers ofTurkish and 29 Spanish speakers who were learning English and acontrol group of 19 English native speakers. The Turkish speakers,who were tested in Turkey, were enrolled in a low-intermediateintensive English class at the Tömer School of foreign languages.The Spanish speakers were adolescents taking an intermediateEnglish class in a private high school in Mar del Plata, Argentina,where the testing took place. Most of these Spanish-speakinglearners also reported taking extra English lessons in privatelanguage institutes, on top of the regular English instruction offeredat school. None of the participants in either group had lived orspent time in an English-speaking country. The 19 native speakersof English were tested in Montreal. Table 2 summarizes ageinformation per group.
160 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
3 A reviewer questions why this hypothesis should take precedence over L1 influence. In myview it doesn’t: both morphological differences between languages and the unusual argumentstructure mapping belong to two different levels of representation. Therefore, L1 influenceand reliance on the thematic hierarchy may work in tandem in interlanguage grammars (seealso Montrul, 2000a).
Silvina Montrul 161
b Test instruments: To try to ensure comparability of subjectstested in different countries and institutions, a cloze test was usedas an independent measure of proficiency and was administered tothe L2 learners and the native speakers (for the validity of suchtests, see Jonz, 1990). The test consisted of a page-length passage inEnglish. Every sixth word in the passage was omitted, resulting ina total of 40 blanks. Subjects were required to provide one wordper 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 tojudge them in a given grammatical context. The rationale behindthis task is that if a person does not know the basic meaning of averb, then he or she might not know its syntactic behaviour. A listof 41 verbs was presented in random order (30 of which are notrelevant to the studies presented here), which the learners had totranslate into their native language. Table 3 presents the verbsrelevant to this investigation. The verbs were presented in theirinfinitive form. All those verbs that were unknown to individuallearners were excluded from subsequent analyses of their results inthe main task. Thus, results on particular verbs will only be basedon those subjects who gave an accurate translation in thevocabulary translation task, following the same procedure carriedout by Juffs (1996) and White et al. (1999).
To see whether learners knew the transitivity and morphologicalform of the verbs, a picture judgement task was designed. The taskconsisted of pictures and pairs of sentences. There were two picturesper verb: one picture illustrated the verb in a transitive situation,
Table 2 English study: Participants’ information
Participants n Mean age Range Age of first Rangeexposure
Table 3 Verbs used in the vocabulary translation task and in the picturejudgement task
Change of state Psych
open surpriseclose borebreak annoymelt frightenburn amusesink
162 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
where an agent was doing something to a person or an object, andthe other one presented the change of state or result, where onlyone participant was portrayed (see Figures 1 and 2). Participantssaw a total of 83 pictures in random order assembled in a booklet(only 22 pairs are relevant to the results of this study). Each picturewas accompanied by a pair of sentences, presented in a separateanswer sheet. Next to each sentence in the pair there was a scaleranging from –3 (completely unnatural) to 3 (completely natural).
All transitive pictures were accompanied by transitive sentencesand all intransitive pictures by intransitive sentences. I manipulatedthe morphological and syntactic form of each verb. Since Englishdoes not have overt causative or anticausative morphology twoverbs were used: the periphrastic verb make for the transitivesentences, and the verb get in its inchoative use (Haegeman, 1985)for the intransitive ones. The idea was to see whether learners
Figure 1 Example of pictures and sentences with change of state verbsNote: *This sentence is grammatical but semantically anomalous in the contextprovided by the picture because there is only one agent involved, instead of twoas the periphrastic construction indicates.
The theif broke the window. –3 –2 –1 0 1 2 3The thief made the window break.* –3 –2 –1 0 1 2 3
whose language has overt morphology in the intransitive form ofalternating verbs would show a preference for this structure overthe inchoative form with zero-morphology.
Figures 1 and 2 show representative examples with the verbsbreak and frighten. Depending on the verb, sometimes the twosentences were appropriate, in other cases one sentence wasappropriate and the other was not, and yet in other cases bothsentences were either ungrammatical, or grammatical butsemantically inappropriate in the context provided by the picture(e.g., the sentence Frank made the window break in the exampleabove). Participants were asked to judge both the meaning of thesentences and their grammatical correctness in the same test,depending on the form of the verb.
The lion frightened the hunter –3 –2 –1 0 1 2 3The lion made the hunter frightened –3 –2 –1 0 1 2 3
Figure 2 Example of pictures and sentences with psych verbs
c Specific hypotheses for the English study:Change of state verbs: Spanish learners will be accurate with thezero-morphology of transitive forms (The thief broke the window),but will be inaccurate with the zero-morphology of intransitiveforms (The window broke), preferring the periphrastic get verb asa surrogate form for the reflexive clitic in Spanish (The window gotbroken).
Since both the causative and anticausative morphologicalpatterns exist in Turkish with change of state verbs, learners couldtransfer either one of the patterns into English for all verbs, or theycould assume that those verbs that in Turkish belong to thecausative pattern (melt, sink) and those that belong to theanticausative pattern (open, close, break) follow differentmorphological patterns in English as well. That is, these learnersmay assume that melt and sink are not possible with zero-morphology in the transitive form, but that open, close and melt arepossible.
Psych verbs: Spanish learners will be more accurate with themorphology of psych verbs (which matches the Spanishanticausative pattern) than with the morphology of change of stateverbs, if they assume that the two verb classes behavemorphologically alike in English as well.
If the Turkish learners transfer the causative pattern with psychverbs, they will be very inaccurate with zero-derived transitivepsych verbs (The lion frightened the hunter), preferring sentenceswith make instead (The lion made the hunter frightened). They willalso 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 theresults of the cloze test in terms of mean percentage accuracyscores. To convert results to percentages, a score of, for example, 36was divided by the maximum possible (40) to yield 90%. Each blankwas worth 2.5 points in percentages. The Turkish-speaking learnersperformed much worse than the Spanish group. As a result, they
164 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Table 4 English cloze test: Mean percentage accuracy scores
were classified as low-intermediate. The Spanish-speaking groupwas classified as intermediate. According to a one-way ANOVA,there were significant differences between the control group andthe two groups of learners (F(2,62) = 343.118, p < 0.0001). In turn,the two groups of learners were significantly different from eachother (Tukey, p < 0.0001). Unfortunately, this classification bylanguage proficiency does not allow a direct comparison of Spanishand Turkish speakers in the main task. Therefore, any speculationon the effects of L1 influence have to be made indirectly, byconcentrating on the developmental paths of each groupindependently of each other. It can also be argued that theSpanish-speaking learners are more proficient than the Turkish-speaking learners because there is also a significant difference inthe mean of age of exposure (Spanish = 8.12, Turkish = 12.83,F(3,62) = 177.764, p< 0.0001). However, I checked on learnersin both groups whose age of exposure ranged from 10 to 12(Turkish, n = 10; Spanish, n = 6) and I still found significantdifferences. I conclude that the Spanish-speaking learners aresuperior in proficiency to the Turkish learners, regardless of age ofexposure.
The picture judgement task: Mean responses on the seven-pointscale were submitted to a factorial ANOVA with repeatedmeasures, 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 high-intermediate) as the between factor. Results revealed no maineffect for verb (F(1,61) = 2.971, p < 0.09), suggesting that there wereno overall differences between the means for change of state verbsand 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, morphologyby group, and verb by morphology by group) were significant at theα .05 level. The overall performance of the Turkish-speakinglearners, who were at a lower level of proficiency according to thecloze test, was significantly less accurate than the performance ofthe control group (Tukey, p < 0.003), but not less accurate than thatof the two Spanish groups.
Group results of change of state verbs: Figure 3 shows the meanaccuracy scores on change of state verbs. For means and standarddeviations refer to Table 1 in Appendix 1. Results of transitivesentences (The thief broke the window) were overall very accuratein comparison to all the other types, but revealed significant
Silvina Montrul 165
differences between the control group and the Turkish-speakinggroup (Tukey, p < 0.35), and between the control group and theintermediate Spanish group (Tukey, p < 0.0001). The latterdifference 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 makewere similar across groups, and there were no significant differenceshere (F(3,64) = 1.048, p < 0.378). It was not the case that the Turkishlearners preferred the periphrastic causative (The thief made thewindow break) over the zero-derived transitive form (The thiefbroke the window), suggesting that they did not transfer thecausative pattern from their L1 onto English.
As for the intransitive forms (The window broke), results showedsignificant differences between groups (F(3,64) = 14.213, p <0.0001). The control group was significantly more accurate than allthe groups, but there were no differences between the two Spanishgroups and the Turkish group. The results of inchoative get werealso significant (F(3,64) = 5.611, p < 0.002), largely due to theperformance of the two Spanish groups, who rated these sentencesmore acceptable than the control group and the Turkish group(Tukey, p < 0.0001). In short, these results show that the Spanishlearners have transferred the anticausative pattern onto English, asrevealed by their rejection of zero-derived intransitive forms andtheir acceptance of periphrastic get as a surrogate for the reflexiveclitic in Spanish. As for the Turkish speakers, they have clearly nottransferred the causative pattern, but they were less accepting ofzero-derived inchoative forms than of zero-derived causative forms,
166 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
3
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3Transitive *Transitive Inchoative Inchoative
make get
Mea
n r
esp
on
ses
Figure 3 English study: Mean responses on change of state verbs
suggesting that they have partially transferred the anticausativepattern.
On failing to find that the Turkish speakers did not transfer anyone pattern from their L1, an individual item analysis wasperformed to find out whether these learners might treat all theseverbs differently, since the change of state verbs used in the picturejudgement task belong to different morphological patterns inTurkish. Figure 4 presents the results of individual verbs for thisgroup. As Figure 4 shows, the Turkish speakers were very accuratewith alternating verbs in the lexical causative construction. Thereappears to be more variation between verbs in the periphrastic-make constructions, especially with the verb sink, which was ratedhigher than the other verbs, but there was no statistical differencebetween lexical items. Differences between lexical items were foundwith the intransitive construction due to the verb break (F(5,83) =2.94, p < 0.016) and with the get construction. In general, there wereno differences between the verbs that belong to the causativepattern in Turkish (sink, melt) and those that belong to theanticausative pattern (break, open, close) and burn, which has asuppletive pair in Turkish. However, in the get-construction, sinkand melt were accepted as more grammatical than the other verbs,contrary to what one would expect if these learners follow their L1patterns; these two verbs belong to the causative pattern whileopen, close and break have anticausative morphology in Turkish. Inshort, the Turkish speakers do not treat individual verbs differently.
Silvina Montrul 167
3
2
1
0
–1
–2
–3Transitive make Intransitive get
Mea
n r
esp
on
ses
Figure 4 English study: Turkish-speaking learners’ responses on individualchange of state verbs
Group results of psych verbs: Figure 5 shows the results of psychverbs. Mean and standard deviations appear in Table 2 in Appendix1. 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 thesesentences (Tukey, p < 0.0025), as predicted. The results of psychverbs in the periphrastic causative construction (The lion made thehunter frightened) was similar across groups (F(3,64) = .934, p <0.430). Zero-derived intransitive psych verbs are ungrammatical inEnglish (*The hunter frightened). However, the Turkish learnersrated these verb forms grammatical, while all other groups ratedthem ungrammatical (F(3,64) = 35.958, p < 0.0001). The oppositeresponse pattern obtained with the grammatical counterparts withget (The hunter got frightened). Here again, the Turkish group wassignificantly different from the rest (F(3,64) = 35.728, p < 0.0001)because they rated these sentences ungrammatical. In short, unlikethe results of change of state verbs, the results of psych verbs arevery clear for the two groups, and fully confirm the hypotheses. TheTurkish speakers have transferred the causative morphologicalpattern into English because they rejected zero-derived transitiveforms 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 theanticausative pattern, as in Spanish.
168 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Figure 5 English study: Mean responses on psych verbs
e Individual results of the English study: To see whether thegroup results obtained at the individual level, scalar data wasconverted to nominal data. Individual results by subjects werecomputed in the following way. If a learner had consistentlyaccepted 70% of grammatical sentences for each verb class andeach structure and had correctly rejected 70% of ungrammaticalsentences, then it was considered that the individual had knowledgeof the morphological patterns tested. Table 5 reports the numberof subjects per group how scored below 70% with each verb classand structures. Individual results confirm the group results byshowing that most Spanish speakers were very inaccurate with zero-derived intransitive change of state verbs but quite accurate withpsych verbs. In contrast, most of the Turkish speakers wereinaccurate with psych verbs, particularly with the forms conformingto the anticausative pattern: zero-derived transitive forms andinchoative get forms.
2 Experiment 2: L2 Spanish
a Participants: Participants in this experiment were 20 nativespeakers of Spanish from Argentina who acted as control, 19Turkish speakers and 31 English speakers who were intermediatelearners of Spanish. The Turkish speakers were tested in Turkey andwere students of an intermediate Spanish class at Istanbul TechnicalUniversity. These learners knew English as well. The English-speaking learners were tested in Canada and the USA, and werealso enrolled in intermediate Spanish classes at their respectiveuniversities. The learners tested in the USA were Englishmonolinguals; those recruited in Canada had intermediate
Silvina Montrul 169
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)
knowledge of French. In all cases, students were learning Spanishusing a predominantly communicative methodology and classes metfor 3–4 hours per week. The students tested in Canada and the USAwere using the same textbook. The Turkish students were usingmaterials developed by the Consulate of Spain in Istanbul.Information about the participants in the Spanish experiment issummarized in Table 6.
b Test instruments: The same cloze test, vocabulary translationtask and picture judgement task used in the English experiment buttranslated into Spanish were used for this experiment, including theexact same lexical items: the change of state verbs romper (‘break’),abrir (‘open’), cerrar (‘close’), quemar (‘burn’), derretir (‘melt’) andhundir (‘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, givingthe following sentence pairs:
Spanish version Translation
18) El ladrón rompió la ventana. ‘The thief broke the window.’* El ladrón hizo romper la ventana. ‘The thief made the window
break.’
19) La ventana se rompió. ‘The window broke.’* La ventana rompió. ‘The window broke.’
20) El león asustó al cazador. ‘The lion frightened the hunter.’El león hizo asustar al cazador. ‘The lion made the hunter
frightened.’
21) El cazador se asustó. ‘The hunter got frightened.’* El cazador asustó. ‘The hunter frightened.’
c Specific hypotheses for the Spanish study:Change of state verbs: Significant differences between the Turkish-speaking and English-speaking learners are expected in the picturejudgement task. In particular, English speakers will have more
170 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Table 6 Spanish study: Participants’ information
Participants n Mean age Range Age of first Rangeexposure
difficulty with the reflexive morphology of intransitive forms (Laventana se rompió ‘The window broke’) than the Turkish speakers,given that the Turkish speakers have this morphological patternavailable from their L1. That is, the English speakers will preferzero-derived forms in the inchoative (*La ventana rompió ‘Thewindow broke’) instead of the correct forms with se.
Psych verbs: The Turkish speakers will be more inaccurate than theEnglish speakers because these verbs conform to the causativepattern in Turkish. That is, these Turkish learners will reject zero-derived transitive forms (El león asustó al cazador ‘The lionfrightened the hunter’) and intransitive forms with se (El cazadorse asustó ‘The hunter got frightened’). The English speakers areexpected to perform like the control group, since in Spanish andEnglish psych verbs conform to the anticausative pattern.
d Results of the Spanish study:The cloze test: According to the results of the cloze test, learnerswere classified into different proficiency groups. The 19 Turkishspeakers were classified as intermediate. The English learners weresplit into two groups: 15 intermediate and 16 high-intermediate. Aone-way ANOVA revealed significant differences between thenative speakers and the different proficiency levels (F(3,66) =250.675, p < 0.0001). The intermediate groups were also significantlydifferent from the high-intermediate group (Tukey, p < 0.0001). Themeans in percentages are reported in Table 7.
The picture judgement task: As in the English experiment, arepeated measures ANOVA on the scalar data of the picturejudgement task showed no main effect for verb. However, all othermain effects (group, transitivity and morphology) and interactionswere significant at the α .05 level.
Group results of change of state verbs: Figure 6 illustrates the meanresponses on change of state verbs. Table 3 in Appendix 1 showsmeans and standard deviations. All groups were very accurate with
Silvina Montrul 171
Table 7 Spanish cloze test: Mean percentage accuracy scores
transitive change of state verbs, and there were no significantdifferences among them (F(3,67) = .880, p < 0.456). In addition,results of the periphrastic construction with hacer were also similarthroughout (F(3,67) = .859, p < 0.467). With the intransitivesentences without se (*La ventana rompió ‘The window broke’),there were significant differences among groups (F(3,67) = 56.237p < 0.0001), largely due to the performance of the two English-speaking groups who rated these sentences as grammatical. Resultsof intransitive forms with se, which were also significant (F(3,67) =18.839, p < 0.0001), display the opposite pattern: while the controland Turkish-speaking learners rated these sentences positively onthe scale, the English speakers were much less accurate. Thus, theseresults show that the Turkish group is more accurate than the twoEnglish groups because the Turkish speakers have transferred theanticausative morphological pattern from their L1.
Group results of psych verbs: Figure 7 displays the results of psychverbs. (For means and standard deviations refer to Table 4 inAppendix 1.) Results of transitive psych verbs (El león asustó alcazador ‘The lion frightened the hunter’) are significant (F(3,67) =8.80, p < 0.0001), because the two intermediate groups (Turkish andEnglish) were less accurate than the control group and the high-intermediate English group, although only the Turkish group wassignificantly different from the control and high-intermediateEnglish group (Tukey, p < 0.0001). Contrary to expectations,however, all learner groups were very inaccurate with psych verbs
172 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Figure 6 Spanish study: Mean responses on change of state verbs
in the periphrastic hacer (‘make’) construction (F(3,67) = 18.600,p < .0001). My suspicion is that this result is related to the complexsyntactic properties of causative constructions in Romance (seeMontrul, 2000b).
Intransitive sentences without se (*El cazador asustó ‘The hunterfrightened’) received negative ratings by the control and Turkishspeakers, and means around the zero-mark by the English speakers(F(3,67) = 56.237, p < 0.0001). Intransitive sentences with se (Elcazador se asustó ‘The hunter frightened’) were also statisticallydifferent between the control and the three learner groups (F(3,67)= 7. 091, p < 0.0001). While the Turkish learners accepted theanticausative pattern with these verbs, results show that the Englishspeakers were more inaccurate at rejecting the zero-derived forms(without se) with change of state verbs (*La ventana rompió ‘Thewindow broke’) than with psych verbs (*El cazador asustó ‘Thelion frightened’) (intermediate = p < 0.009; high-intermediate =p < 0.005), presumably because English psych verbs require theperiphrastic form with get in the intransitive form (The hunter gotfrightened), while change of state verbs do not.
e Individual results of the Spanish study: Individual results bysubjects, displayed in Table 8, show that more English speakersmade consistent errors with intransitive forms of change of stateverbs than with intransitive forms of psych verbs, although the errorrate with psych verbs is still quite high. More Turkish learners seemto have problems with transitive psych verbs than with any other
Figure 7 Spanish study: Mean responses on psych verbs
verb form (excluding the periphrastic construction with psychverbs).
A large percentage of English-speaking individuals scored below70% with the inchoative forms of change of state verbs. More than80% of learners accepted zero-derived forms, while more than 50%of intermediate individuals and 25% of high-intermediateindividuals rejected correct forms with the clitic se. The Turkishlearners were overall more accurate than the English learners. Asfor psych verbs, some learners in the Turkish and the intermediateEnglish group had problems with transitive psych verbs, but thepercentage was higher in the Turkish group. The periphrasticconstruction was problematic for the great majority of learners. FewTurkish learners had problems with inchoative psych verbs (with seand zero-derived), while many of the English learners had problemswith these structures. However, few learners had less problems withinchoative psych verbs than with inchoative change of state verbs,and this was expected because English uses the periphrastic formwith 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 Spanishspeakers and 9 Japanese speakers who were learning Turkish inIstanbul at two institutions. Some of the subjects were living inIstanbul and taking Turkish lessons there. All the participants wereadults. Their mean age and mean age of first exposure is illustratedin Table 9.
174 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Table 8 Number of subjects per group in the Spanish study who scored lessthan 70% accuracy with each sentence type and verb form (percentages inbrackets)
b Test instruments: These were the same as the ones used in theSpanish and English experiments, except that they were translatedinto Turkish. Due to the agglutinative nature of the Turkishlanguage, the cloze test had 28 blanks instead of 40. The change ofstate verbs used were kırmak (‘break’), açmak (‘open’) andkapamak (‘close’) from the anticausative pattern, and batmak(‘sink’), erimek (‘melt’) and ölmek (‘die’) from the causativepattern. (The verb burn was replaced by the verb die because burnin Turkish has a suppletive pair while die belongs to the causativepattern.) The psych verbs used were korkutmak (‘frighten’),kızdırmak (‘anger’), eglendirmek (‘amuse’), sevindirmek (‘please’),and s,as,ırmak (‘confuse’). Examples of sentence pairs used in thepicture judgement task are shown in (22)–(26).
Causative pattern Translation
22) Gemi batmıs,. ‘The boat sank.’* Gemi batılmıs,. ‘The boat sank.’
23) Düs,man gemiyi batırmıs,. ‘The enemy sank the boat.’* Düs,man gemiyi batmıs,. ‘The enemy sank the boat.’
Anticausative pattern
24) Hırsız pencereyi kırdı. ‘The thief broke the window.’* Hırsız pencereyi kırırdı. ‘The thief broke the window.’
c Specific hypotheses for the Turkish study:Change of state verbs: The Spanish speakers will be more accuratewith verbs of the anticausative pattern than with verbs of thecausative pattern. The English speakers will be equally accurate orinaccurate with verbs of the two morphological patterns, but willtend to accept zero-derived transitive and intransitive forms. TheJapanese learners are expected to be quite inaccurate with changeof state verbs because the equivalent translations of the verbs usedin the test have different morphology in Japanese (break isanticausative, open and sink are causative, close and melt areequipollent, die is suppletive).
Psych verbs: Spanish and English speakers will behave alike,probably rejecting psych verbs with causative morphology andaccepting intransitive forms with anticausative morphology. TheJapanese speakers will be more accurate than the Spanish andEnglish speakers with psych verbs, transferring the causativemorphological pattern from their L1.
d Results of the Turkish study:The cloze test: Results of the cloze test are presented in Table 10 inmean percentage accuracy scores. Based on the overall scores, theEnglish-speaking group and the Japanese speakers were classifiedas intermediate, while the Spanish-speaking group was split into twodifferent levels: intermediate and high-intermediate. There weresignificant differences between the control group and the threegroups of learners (ANOVA F(4,65) = 188.45, p < 0.0001; Tukey,p < 0.0001). The Spanish, English and Japanese intermediate groupswere not significantly different from each other, but the threegroups were significantly different from the high-intermediateSpanish group.
The picture judgement task: A factorial ANOVA with repeatedmeasures 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).
176 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Table 10 Turkish cloze test: Mean percentage accuracy scores
All other main effects and interactions were significant at the α .05level.
Group results of change of state verbs: Figure 8 presents the meansfor change of state verbs of the causative pattern (bat-ır-mak ‘sink’tr.; bat-mak ‘sink’ intr.). Table 5 in Appendix 1 shows the meansand standard deviations. The results of transitive forms with thecausative morpheme (bat-ır-mak ‘sink’) showed significantdifferences among groups (F(4,64) = 4.952, p < 0.002), mainlybecause the Japanese speakers rated these sentences less acceptablethan the other groups (Tukey, p < 0.001). Results of incorrect zero-derived 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 thecontrol group and the high-intermediate Spanish group at rejectingthese forms. Results of zero-derived inchoative forms (bat-mak‘sink’) were also statistically different between the control groupand all the learners (F(4,64) = 3.375, p < 0.014), and so were theresults of incorrect forms with anticausative morphology (F(4,64) =12.716, p < 0.0001).
Results of change of state verbs of the anticausative pattern (kır-mak ‘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
Figure 8 Turkish study: Change of state verbs of the causative pattern
intermediate groups who were statistically different from those ofthe control, Japanese, and high-intermediate Spanish groups (Tukey,p < 0.007). Although all groups were quite accurate with zero-derived transitive forms, there were significant differences amonggroups due to the performance of the English speakers, who ratedthese forms lower on the scale than the other groups (F(4,64) =3.744, p < 0.008). Results of intransitive sentences with and withoutthe suffix –Il were also significant (F(4,64) = 6.479, p < 0.002 andF(4,64) = 6.398, p < 0.0001, respectively) due to the performance ofthe English speakers, who were more inaccurate than the othergroups.
Group results of psych verbs: Figure 10 displays the results of psychverbs, which belong to the causative pattern in Turkish (kork-ut-mek ‘frighten’, kork-mek ‘get frightened’). Table 7 in Appendix 1shows means and standard deviations. The Spanish and Englishintermediate learners failed to reject incorrect zero-derivedtransitive forms, unlike the Japanese and high-intermediate Spanishspeakers and the controls (F(4,64) = 6.985, p < 0.0001), and this isexplained by transfer of their L1 morphological patterns. However,although the results of correct forms with causative morphologywere also statistically significant (F(4,64) = 3.065, p < 0.028), theEnglish and Spanish intermediate groups were more accurate ataccepting grammatical forms than at rejecting ungrammaticalforms. As for intransitive psych verbs, all learner groups acceptedthese sentences like the control group (F(4,64) = 1.038, p < 0.394).
178 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
Figure 9 Turkish study: Change of state verbs of the anticausative pattern
By contrast, the mean for incorrect forms with anticausativemorphology was statistically significant (F(4,64) = 5.293, p <0.0001), largely due to the performance of the intermediate Spanishand English groups.
Individual results of the Turkish study: Individual results, presentedin Table 11, show that, in comparison with the other groups, manyEnglish speakers have problems with the three verb classes. A fewsubjects in the intermediate Spanish group have more problemswith the ungrammatical forms of change of state verbs of the twomorphological patterns, while 60% of high-intermediate learnersonly have problems with incorrect morphology. Finally, all theJapanese speakers were very accurate with psych verbs, aspredicted, but few had some problems with change of state verbs,perhaps due to the fact that change of state verbs in Japanese comein a variety of morphological patterns.
V Discussion and conclusion
This study set out to investigate whether morphological errors withargument structure changing morphology were unconstrained orsystematic in interlanguage grammars. Assuming the tenets of theFull Transfer/Full Access hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) itwas hypothesized that surface morphological errors would beconstrained by the way the abstract features associated withcausative or anticausative morphology were phonologically spelledout in the learners’ respective L1s, such that if features were
expressed with overt morphophonology in the L1 but with zero-morphology in the L2, L2 learners would tend to find surrogatemorphophonological forms specific to the L2 to express thosefeatures. If features were expressed with zero-morphology in the L1but with overt morphology in the L2, learners would tend toassume, at least initially, that those features received nophonological content in the L2 either. This general hypothesis wasconfirmed in the three experimental studies presented.4
Results of the English study revealed that the Spanish-speakinglearners rejected zero-derived inchoative forms of change of stateverbs (The window broke) and accepted more than any of the othergroups forms with get (The window got broken). Since inchoativeshave a reflexive morpheme in Spanish (La ventana se rompió),these results show that Spanish speakers rely on the periphrasticform with get to map the formal features [–log subject] [–transitive].In contrast, the Turkish speakers, whose language has both causativeand anticausative patterns for change of state verbs, did not transferany particular morphological pattern. However, these learners wereoverall more accurate with causative forms than with inchoativeforms. With psych verbs, both groups behaved according to thehypotheses: the Spanish speakers were accurate with causative (Thelion frightened the hunter) and inchoative forms (The hunter gotfrightened), while the Turkish speakers were very inaccurate withzero-derived causative forms and inchoatives with get, preferringtransitive forms with make and inchoative forms with zero-morphology. Thus, these results suggest that they had indeedtransferred the causative morphological pattern with these verbs,following their L1.
In common with the English study, the Spanish study alsorevealed significant differences between English and Turkishspeakers with change of state verbs. Consistent with the predictions,the English speakers incorrectly accepted zero-derived inchoativeforms (La ventana rompió), which are grammatical in their L1,while the Turkish speakers did not. The Turkish speakers wereoverall more accurate because they have the anticausativemorphological pattern available from the L1. With psych verbs, theTurkish speakers had problems with transitive zero-derived forms(El león asustó al cazador), although they did not prefer the
Silvina Montrul 181
4 An anonymous reviewer disagrees with this interpretation and suggests that frequency inthe input of certain forms (such as the get structures in English) or the Turkish causativemorpheme may play a role in these transfer effects. The reviewer argues that L1 morphologymight act as an input filter, facilitating noticing when L1 and L2 are congruent, and filteringout data where there is a mismatch. I still hold that this is transfer and what is reallytransferred are the formal features and the overt/non-overt morphophonological expressionof those features.
periphrastic form with hacer. The English speakers were moreaccurate 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 andEnglish learners accepted forms with overt causative morphologywith change of state verbs and with psych verbs, even when theseverbs in their languages have zero-morphology in transitive forms.The English learners were more inaccurate than the Spanish andJapanese learners in accepting change of state verbs withanticausative morphology on the inchoative form. However, despiteshowing accuracy with grammatical forms, the Spanish and Englishlearners of Turkish were inaccurate at rejecting ungrammaticalforms. Since they accepted grammatical forms together withungrammatical forms consistent with their L1, these learners exhibitoptionality in their grammars. The Japanese had some problemswith change of state verbs, perhaps due to the fact that change ofstate verbs in Japanese come in a variety of morphological patterns,but were overall more inaccurate with change of state verbs of thecausative patterns than with those of the anticausative pattern. Withpsych verbs, the intermediate Spanish and English groups wereinaccurate at rejecting incorrect forms without causativemorphology in the transitive form (*Arslan aucıyı korkmus, ‘Thelion frightened the hunter’) and with anticausative morphology onthe 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) andthe intermediate Japanese group (whose language behavesmorphologically like Turkish with these verbs) patterned with thecontrol group of Turkish native speakers. Thus, the predictionsbased on L1 influence are largely confirmed. In cases where the L1and L2 express the abstract features of causative or anticausativemorphology overtly, learners have little difficulty learning thecorrect L2-specific morphophonological spell-outs for thosefeatures. In cases where the L1 and L2 differ in terms ofmorphological spell-outs, learners tend to behave according to whattheir L1 dictates: Thus, English learners have difficulty learningovert morphology in Spanish and Turkish, while Turkish andSpanish learners have difficulty learning that the abstract featuresassociated with causative and anticausative morphology arephonologically null in English.
Echoing the findings of Lardière and Schwartz (1997) withmorphological errors in English deverbal compounds (dish-washer),the Spanish learners in the English study used whatever spell-out
182 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
was available in the L2 to encode the morphosyntactic features oftheir representations. Therefore, they chose the verb get as asurrogate morphological spell-out for the features [–log subject][–transitive] that the reflexive morpheme of inchoative forms carryin Spanish. Similarly, the Turkish learners in the English studypreferred the periphrastic form with hacer over the zero-derivedform for causative psych verbs as a surrogate for the Turkishcausative morpheme. Although these periphrastic forms areexpressed syntactically rather than derivationally, notice that theycarry the same abstract features [± log subject] [± transitive] as theaffixes. (Embick (2000) discusses how Distributed Morphology canaccount for analytic and synthetic forms derived from a commonset of abstract syntactic features.) This observation would explainwhy, contrary to predictions, in his study on the L2 processing ofthe morphosyntax of causative and inchoative forms, Juffs (1998)found that Spanish-speaking learners of English did not acceptsentences with reflexive pronouns in English as counterparts of thereflexive clitic in Romance (*First of all the chocolate melted itselfon the cake). Although the morpheme of inchoative forms inSpanish is a reflexive clitic, the abstract features of this morphemewith these verbs are not those of a reflexive pronoun. So the reasonwhy Spanish learners in the Juffs’s study did not accept itself as asurrogate for se is perhaps because, while the translation of theforms match, the features do not. However, Adjémian (1983)observed that French speakers learning English incorrectly usedreflexive pronouns in English as surrogate for the reflexive clitic inFrench (At sixty-five years old they must retire themselves becausethis is a rule of society ‘A soixante-cinq ans ils doivent se retirerparce que c’est une règle de la societé’). In fact, the reflexive cliticin Spanish is polyfunctional: it has different semantic and syntacticfunctions (i.e., abstract features), but the same phonological form.However, notice that L2 learners are not always misled by thissurface similarity of affixes. What they are sensitive to is whetherthe abstract features coincide. This explains why they prefer getrather than itself as a surrogate form for the features [–log subject][–transitive]. In short, as already pointed out by Lardière andSchwartz (1997) not just any phonological spell-out will do torealize the abstract features of the learners’ representations.
While the purpose of this study was to document problems withthe morphological realizations of causative and anticausativemorphology with change of state verbs and psych verbs, and I havelargely demonstrated that the L1 indeed plays a role in this respect,the learning problem with these verbs is not so simplistic. Oneshould not dismiss the fact that difficulty with transitive psych verbs
Silvina Montrul 183
in particular is also due to the way in which arguments are mappedto syntactic positions, as many studies have already documented(see, amongst others, Chen, 1996; Juffs, 1996; Montrul, 1998; Whiteet al., 1998). Since the mapping of the thematic roles with agentivechange of state verbs does not violate prominence relations amongarguments, while the mapping of psych verbs does (Grimshaw,1990), one expects learners to be more inaccurate with transitivepsych verbs than with transitive change of state verbs. If theproblem were only morphological, then learners should behavealike with both verb classes, since transitive psych verbs andtransitive change of state verbs are zero-derived in Spanish andEnglish, and have causative morphology in Turkish. In fact,individual results of the English study (see Table 5) show that nolearner was inaccurate with zero-derived transitive change ofstate verbs, but 11 Turkish speakers, 4 intermediate Spanishspeakers and 2 high-intermediate Spanish speakers wereconsistently inaccurate with these verbs. In the Spanish study (seeTable 8), 1 individual from the Turkish group and 1 from the Englishgroup were inaccurate with transitive change of state verbs while 6Turks and 2 English learners were inaccurate with transitive psychverbs.
Figures 11, 12 and 13 display the mean scores for transitivechange of state verbs and psych verbs in the English, Spanish andTurkish studies respectively. In the three studies there were nosignificant differences between psych verbs and change of stateverbs for the control groups. However, in the Spanish and English
184 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
3
2
1
0
–1
Mea
n r
esp
on
ses
Figure 11 English study: Mean responses on transitive change of state vs.transitive psych verbs
Psych
Change of state
studies learners rated psych verbs lower than change of state verbs,and the difference between the means was significant for the threelearner 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 Spanishstudy (Turkish: t(18) = 7.305, p < .0001; English: t(14) = 2.619, p <0.20). Similarly, in the Turkish study, only the means of theintermediate English and Spanish learners were statisticallydifferent from each other (English: t(17) = 2.064, p < 0.038; Spanish:
Silvina Montrul 185
3
2
1
0
Mea
n r
esp
on
ses
Figure 12 Spanish study: Mean responses on transitive change of state vs.transitive psych verbs
3
2
1
0
Mea
n r
esp
on
ses
Figure 13 Turkish study: Mean responses on transitive change of state vs.transitive psych verbs
Psych
Change of state
Psych
Change of state
t(13) = 2.793, p < 0.018). In short, these results confirm that learnersat lower levels of proficiency (low-intermediate and intermediatein this case) have problems both with the argument structure andwith the morphology of psych verbs, if the latter does not matchthe morphophonological pattern of the L1. The clearest example ofthis observation is the low-intermediate Turkish group in theEnglish study. These findings suggest that, like L1 learners, L2learners respect the thematic hierarchy – a UG component – whenlearning these verbs, thereby failing to accept experiencers in objectpositions.
The final issue I would like to address is whether acquiring overtmorphology for learners whose language have zero-morphology iseasier than acquiring zero-morphology for learners who have overtmorphology in their L1. As pointed out earlier, this prediction hasbeen implicit in studies by Chen (1996), White et al. (1998) andMontrul (1997). Except for Montrul (1997), who presented datafrom the acquisition of morphologically different languages, theother 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 isindeed confirmed. In general, we find that the Turkish speakershave more difficulty learning zero-morphology in the English studythan English learners learning overt causative morphology in theTurkish study. It was also found that English and Spanish speakerslearning Turkish were very accurate with the acceptance of overtcausative morphology (see Figure 11), even when themorphological pattern of their L1 was zero for those forms. It wasalso found that these learners accepted both grammatical and L1-induced ungrammatical forms. This suggests that Turkish inputprovides abundant clues to learners to realize that formal featuresare morphophonologically spelled out; however, this realization hasnot yet forced learners to abandon their L1-induced phonologicalspell-out. That is why learners accepted correct forms with causativemorphology, but at the same time failed to reject incorrect formswith zero-causative morphology. In contrast, the results of theSpanish and English study showed less optionality.
To conclude, this study has shown that errors with argumentstructure alternations can also be related to the way the alternationsare morphologically expressed. These surface morphological errorsare computational, in the sense that learners have problemsmerging features and forms, rather than representational, and areconstrained by the learners’ morphophonological shape of L1affixes. In the specific case of causative psychological verbs theproblem for learners is both with the atypical alignment of thematic
186 Variability in argument-structure-changing morphology
roles to syntactic positions, as several studies have documented, andwith the morphological expression of the [+log subject] [+transitive]features in languages with zero-morphology. These findings areconsistent with the predictions of the Full Access/Full TransferHypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996).
Acknowledgements
The data reported in this article were collected in the Summer andFall of 1996. I thank all the students in Turkey, Argentina, Canadaand the USA who took part in the studies, as well as Hakan Günes,from the Tömer Institute of Foreign Languages and Antonia Panizofrom the Spanish Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, María AngélicaDamiani from the Instituto Albert Einstein in Mar del Plata,Argentina, and Oscar Flores from SUNY Plattsburgh for theirinvaluable assistance in recruiting participants for the studies. I alsothank Servet Okaçtan, Üner Turgar and Ays,e Gurel for theirinvaluable assistance with Turkish at different stages of this project.I thank Lydia White for helpful comments on earlier stages of thiswork, as well two anonymous SLR reviewers for their invaluablecomments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own. Thisresearch was conducted with support from a McGill Faculty ofGraduate Studies and Research Humanities Thesis Grant to theauthor and a grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada (SSHRC 410–95–0720) to Lydia White and NigelDuffield, for which I am grateful.
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Appendix 1Table 1 English study: Mean and standard deviations for change of state verbs
Transitive *Transitive make Inchoative Inchoative get
Control 2.92 –0.09 2.78 0.22(.23) (1.28) (.33) (1.68)
