A Corpus Study of Overpassivization in Korean EFL Learners’ English Writings

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

L2 learners’ tendency to incorrectly passivize intransitive verbs is called overpassivization. The overpassivization phenomenon is a language-universal phenomenon which occurs in the interlanguage of learners from various L1 backgrounds (Ju, 2000). This study investigates the overpassivization errors in three types of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives with a transitive counterpart, unaccusatives without a transitive counterpart, and unergatives. In addition, this study attempts to find out whether factors such as the animacy of each verb’s subject and proficiency level have an influence on the pattern of overpassivization errors. Using the English writings of Korean university students as a corpus, it was revealed that there are significant differences in the error rates among different types of intransitive verbs. Moreover, the pattern of overpassivization errors differed according to the animacy of the subject. However, no differences corresponding to the four different proficiency groups (low, mid-low, mid, and mid-high according to their TOEIC scores) were observed. The results from this study demonstrate that that the verb type and animacy play a key role in the pattern of overpassivization errors, but that such errors do not decrease as the proficiency level of L2 learners increases.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. PREVIOUS RESEARCH
• III. METHOD
• IV. RESULTS
• V. DISCUSSION
• VI. CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES