Investigating the learnability of the perfective auxiliary

This paper examines the phenomenon of unaccusativity on the basis of the learnability of the perfective auxiliary by English native speakers of Dutch as a second language. The unaccusative/unergative divide between intransitive verbs has been shown to apply across languages and is widely considered to be innate, although the syntactic manifestations differ between languages. One of the most salient distinctions between unaccusative and unergative verbs is the choice of either HAVE or BE as the perfective auxiliary, and Dutch is one language that makes such a distinction. In a series of papers Sorace (1993, 2000, 2004) suggests that the divide is more complex than a two-way split and that auxiliary selection is gradient, with verbs that fall into certain categories being more consistent in their auxiliary choice both within and across languages, and also more easily learnable. This gradience is summarised in the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy. This paper describes an experiment...Show moreThis paper examines the phenomenon of unaccusativity on the basis of the learnability of the perfective auxiliary by English native speakers of Dutch as a second language. The unaccusative/unergative divide between intransitive verbs has been shown to apply across languages and is widely considered to be innate, although the syntactic manifestations differ between languages. One of the most salient distinctions between unaccusative and unergative verbs is the choice of either HAVE or BE as the perfective auxiliary, and Dutch is one language that makes such a distinction. In a series of papers Sorace (1993, 2000, 2004) suggests that the divide is more complex than a two-way split and that auxiliary selection is gradient, with verbs that fall into certain categories being more consistent in their auxiliary choice both within and across languages, and also more easily learnable. This gradience is summarised in the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy. This paper describes an experiment investigating the interlanguage of Dutch L2 speakers. The findings show a strong tendency for the selection of BE for unaccusative verbs, and also a slight gradient effect in accordance with the ASH.Show less

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Investigating the learnability of the perfective auxiliary