The Effects of Context on L2 Learners’ Verb Subcategorization Biases

Many verbs may be used with more than one subcategorization frame which will vary in their probability of occurrence. This study investigated whether the subcategorization frames chosen by L2 learners of English were affected by contextual information preceding the verb. Thirty-three Korean L2 learners completed a written sentence production task with twenty-two polysemous verbs for which the preferred subcategorization frame differed by sense. The sentence preceding the verb provided biasing context promoting a specific sense of the verb, which in turn increased preference toward a particular subcategorization frame. The sentence completion data demonstrated that direct object (DO) complements were used more often when the verb was preceded by context favoring the DO-biased sense, and sentential complement (SC) subcategorization frames were used more frequently when the preceding context favored the SC-biased sense. These results indicate that L2 learners are sensitive to the fact that the subcategorization frames of verbs are contingent on the sense of the verb promoted by the context. Therefore, this study suggests that in addition to verb bias, verb sense should be incorporated as a factor in interactive constraint-based models.