1 Introduction 1
2 Unaccusative verbs and psych verbs 8
2.1 Unaccusative verbs and causativity 9
2.1.1 Subclasses 11
2.1.2 Case 12
2.1.3 Causative alternation 13
2.1.3.1 Morphological formation 14
2.1.3.2 Semantic representations 15
2.1.3.3 Syntactic derivations 20
2.1.4 Unaccusative verbs in Chinese 25
2.1.4.1 Surface and deep unaccusativity 25
2.1.4.2 Causative alternation 27
2.1.4.2.1 Non-accomplishment verbs 27
2.1.4.2.2 Partitive case 30
2.1.4.2.3 θ-roles 33
2.1.5 Unaccusative verbs in Japanese 34
2.1.6 Unaccusative verbs in Korean 36
2.1.7 Summary 37
2.2 Psych verbs and causativity 39
2.2.1 Semantic representations 39
2.2.2 Syntactic derivations 41
2.2.3 Psych verbs in Chinese 44
2.2.3.1 SE verbs and OE verbs 44
2.2.3.2 Decausativized psych verbs 44
2.2.3.3 Syntactic derivations 46
2.2.4 Psych verbs in Japanese 49
2.2.5 Psych verbs in Korean 50
2.2.6 Summary 51
2.3 Summary 53
3 Resultative and compound causative constructions 60
3.1 Resultative constructions in English 62
3.1.1 The result XP and DOR 64
3.1.2 Semantic and syntactic representations 67
3.1.2.1 The small-clause proposal 67
3.1.2.2 The ternary-analysis approach 70
3.1.2.3 A solution with VP shell 71
3.2 Resultative and compound causative constructions in Chinese 72
3.2.1 Previous studies on resultatives and compound causatives 74
3.2.1.1 Y.Li(1990,1995,1998) 74
3.2.1.2 C.-T.Huang(1992) 78
3.2.1.3 Tang(1997) 80
3.2.2 A proposal of AspP 84
3.2.2.1 The derivation of resultative constructions 85
3.2.2.2 The derivation of compound causative constructions 90
3.3 Resultative and compound causative constructions in Japanese 95
3.4 Resultative and compound causative constructions in Korean 98
3.5 Summary 100
4 Second language acquisition and causativity 108
4.1 A brief review of SLA studies 109
4.1.1 L1 transfer 111
4.1.2 Interlanguage 114
4.1.3 Functional categories 116
4.1.4 Learnability problems 118
4.2 SLA studies of causativity 121
4.2.1 Previous studies 121
4.2.1.1 Juffs(1996b) 121
4.2.1.2 White et al(1999) 123
4.2.1.3 Montrul(1999) 124
4.2.1.4 Montrul(2000) 127
4.2.1.5 Montrul(2001a) 129
4.2.1.6 Cabrera and Zubizarreta(2003) 132
4.2.2 Summary of the findings 134
4.3 Summary 136
5 Research methodology of the present study 138
5.1 Causativity in Chinese,English,Japanese and Korean 139
5.2 Research questions and hypotheses 146
5.2.1 Unaccusative verbs and psych verbs 146
5.2.2 Resultative and compound causative constructions 148
5.2.3 The analytical causative construction 152
5.3 Participants 152
5.4 Procedures and Instruments 156
5.4.1 Data-collecting procedures 156
5.4.2 Instruments 157
5.4.2.1 The production test 158
5.4.2.2 The acceptability judgment test 160
5.4.2.2.1 Psych verbs and unaccusative verbs in the AJ test 161
5.4.2.2.2 Resultative and compound causative constructions in the AJ test 164
5.4.2.3 The comprehension test 169
5.5 Summary 174
6 Results and discussion:psych verbs and unaccusative verbs 176
6.1 Psych verbs 177
6.1.1 Results of the AJ test 178
6.1.1.1 Psych verbs used in the analytical causative construction 180
6.1.1.2 Psych verbs misused as OE verbs 181
6.1.2 Results of the production test 182
6.1.2.1 Psych verbs used in the analytical causative construction 183
6.1.2.2 Psych verbs misused as OE verbs 186
6.1.3 Summary 190
6.2 Unaccusative verbs 192
6.2.1 Results of the AJ test 192
6.2.1.1 L2 Chinese learners'judgments on the ungrammatical alternating unaccusative structures 195
6.2.1.2 Comparisons between judgments on unaccusative verbs and transitive verbs 199
6.2.2 Results of the production test 201
6.2.3 Summary 204
6.3 Comparisons between psych verbs and unaccusative verbs in the group's judgments 205
6.4 Discussion 207
6.4.1 The acquisition of Chinese analytical causative construction 208
6.4.2 Causative errors with unaccusative verbs 209
6.4.3 Fossilized representations of unaccusative verbs 211
7 Results and discussion:resultative and compound causative constructions 218
7.1 Resultative constructions 219
7.1.1 Results of the AJ test 219
7.1.2 Results of the comprehension test 224
7.1.2.1 Resultative construction:Type A 226
7.1.2.2 Resultative construction:Type B 229
7.1.3 Summary 232
7.2 Compound causative constructions 233
7.2.1 Results of the AJ test 233
7.2.1.1 Comparisons between L2 proficiency groups and comparisons between L2 groups from different L1s 236
7.2.1.2 A closer examination of different types of compound causatives 239
7.2.2 Results of the comprehension test 242
7.2.3 Summary 249
7.3 Comparisons between results on the resultative construction,the compound causative construction and the V-NP-XP structure 249
7.4 Discussion 254
7.4.1 The acquisition of the resultative construction 254
7.4.2 The acquisition of the compound causative construction 256
7.4.2.1 L2 Chinese representations of compound causatives 257
7.4.2.2 L1 transfer 264
8 Representations of causativity in L2 Chinese:summary,implication and conclusion 269
8.1 Summary of the empirical study 270
8.2 General discussion:theoretical issues in SLA revisited 273
8.2.1 L1 transfer 273
8.2.2 Functional categories 277
8.2.3 Fossilization 279
8.3 Implications for future research 280
8.4 Conclusion 282
References 283
Appendixes 308
1 General introductions and personal information 308
2 Cloze test 309
3 The production test 311
4 The acceptability judgment test 312
5 Pictures used in the comprehension test 320
6 Testing items used in the experiment 321
7 Descriptive statistics 327
8 Pair-wise comparisons between judgments on compound causatives in the AJ test 335
Figures 119
4.1 The subset condition for two grammars 119
6.1 Psych-verb structures:mean scores in the AJ test 179
6.2 Analytical causative construction:mean scores of the transformed data in the production test 185
6.3 Psych verbs:mean scores of the transformed data in the production test 188
6.4 The unaccusative structure with the Theme argument as sentence subject:mean scores in the AJ test 193
6.5 The incorrect alternating unaccusative structures and the correct transitive control structures:mean scores in the AJ test 195
6.6 Unaccusative verbs:mean scores of the transformed data in the production test 203
6.7 The incorrect OE-verb structure and the incorrect alternating unaccusative structure:mean scores in the AJ test 206
7.1 Resultative constructions:mean scores in the AJ test 221
7.2 Compound causative constructions:mean scores in the AJ test 235
7.3 Comparisons between the resultative construction,the compound causative construction and the V-NP-XP structure:mean scores in the AJ test 251
Tables 37
2.1 Summary:properties of unaccusative verbs in Chinese,English,Japanese and Korean in relation to causativity 37
2.2 Summary:properties of psych verbs in Chinese,English,Japanese and Korean in relation to causativity 51
3.1 Summary:resultative and compound causative constructions in Chinese,English,Japanese and Korean 101
4.1 Previous studies on the acquisition of L2 alternating unaccusative verbs and psych verbs 135
5.1 Information of the subjects in the study 154
5.2 The mean score and standard deviation(SD)of each subject group in the cloze test 154
6.1 The number and percentage of grammatical analytical causative sentences formed and consistent subjects who formed such sentences in the production test 184
6.2 Psych verbs:the number and percentage of three types of structure formed and subjects who consistently formed such structures in the production test 186
6.3 Summary of results on the analytical causative construction and the incorrect OE-verb structure in the AJ test and the production test:pair-wise comparisons 191
6.4 Percentage of rejected and accepted tokens of each of the incorrect alternating unaccusative structures and percentage of subjects who consistently rejected or accepted the three tokens of each structure in the AJ test 198
6.5 Comparisons between judgments on the incorrect alternating unaccusative structures and the correct transitive control structures in paired-samples T tests 200
6.6 Unaccusative verbs:number and percentage of two types of structure formed and consistent subjects who formed such structures in the production test 202
6.7 Summary of results on the ungrammatical alternating unaccusative verbs in the AJ test and the production test:pair-wise comparisons 204
6.8 The OE-verb structure and the active unaccusative structure:percentage of accepted/rejected tokens and that of consistent subjects in the AJ test 207
7.1 Summary of the results on resultative constructions in the AJ test:pair-wise Bonferroni comparisons 222
7.2 Type A of the resultative construction in the comprehension test:frequency(in percentage)of each of the interpretations 227
7.3 Type A of the resultative construction in the comprehension test:percentage of subjects who consistently chose the same option(B,C or D)on the three tokens of the construction 228
7.4 Type B of the resultative construction in the comprehension test:frequency(in percentage)of each of the interpretations 230
7.5 Type B of the resultative construction in the comprehension test:percentage of subjects who consistently chose the same option(B,C or D)on the three tokens of the construction 231
7.6 Compound causative constructions:percentage of subjects who consistently accepted or rejected the three tokens of each type of structure in the AJ test 236
7.7 The compound causative construction in the comprehension test:frequency(in percentage)of each of the interpretations 244
7.8 The compound causative construction in the comprehension test:percentage of subjects who consistently chose the same option(B,C or D)on the three tokens of the construction 244
7.9 Percentage of subjects who consistently accepted or rejected the three tokens of the resultative construction,the compound causative construction and the V-NP-XP structure in the AJ test 251
7.10 Results of paired-samples T tests between the mean scores on the resultative construction,the compound causative construction and the V-NP-XP structure within each subject group in the AJ test 253
7.11 Summary:L2 Chinese groups'judgments of the six types of compound causative construction in terms of mean scores and native-like judgments 256
7.12 The six types of compound causative construction under study:hierarchy of acceptability in terms of mean scores and native-like judgments 257