Causatives and Transitivity in L2 English

This study investigates whether Spanish‐ and Turkish‐speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a Picture Judgment Task show that L2 learners do discover these properties, and that overall verbs appear to cluster in classes in their interlanguage grammars. However, the Turkish group, at a lower proficiency level than the Spanish one, accepted transitivity errors with unaccusative, unergative and non‐alternating transitive verbs. Although some of the developmental trends observed could be attributed to L1 influence, lower‐proficiency learners may start with a wider grammar, and therefore not differentiate lexico‐syntactically among different verb classes. With higher proficiency, L2 learners eventually recover from overgeneralizations.