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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 21, No. 0, pp.1162-1181
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2021
Received 17 Sep 2021 Revised 06 Nov 2021 Accepted 27 Nov 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.21..202111.1162

Investigating the Role of L1 in the Overpassivization of English Unaccusatives by Iranian English Majors

Zahra AmirEsmaili ; Akbar Abbasi Bagherianpour
(corresponding author) Student, Vali-e-Asr University z.amiresmaeli@gmail.com
Assistant Professor, Vali-e-Asr University akabbasi@gmail.com


© 2021 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study investigates the role of Persian complex verbs with the light verb šodæn in overpassivization of English unaccusatives by Iranian English majors. The participants were assigned to three levels of proficiency based on their performance on an Oxford Placement Test. They were also asked to produce the correct forms of 20 unaccusative verbs in two contexts. In the first context the Persian translations of the target sentences were not provided while, in the second, they were. The analysis of the data revealed that the participants’ performance in the two production tasks were significantly different. Language proficiency was a significant factor in the learners’ judgment of overpassivization errors, and the learners' ability to judge the more grammatical form of unaccusative verbs did increase when advancing to a higher proficiency level. The conclusion drawn is that morphological marking and argument structure had significant effects on the rate of overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. It implies that English teachers should pay more attention to English and Persian morphological markings and the important role of the so-called passive light verb šodæn in overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs.

Keywords:

complex verbs, inchoatives, light verbs, overpassivization, šodæn, unaccusative verb

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