Abstract
This paper investigates the aspect of the acquisition of argument structures of English locative verbs by Korean high school EFL learners (more specifically to find which argument between Theme and Location is unmarked for the object position of locative verbs) and the effect of L1 transfer on acquiring L2 argument structures. For the study, 165 Korean high school learners and 11 native English-speaking teachers participated in an elicited-production task, and 76 Korean high school learners and 11 native English-speaking teachers did in a grammatical judgement task. Based on the results, both Korean EFL learners and the native English-speaking teachers preferentially used the Theme-object structure. It can be interpreted that Theme is an unmarked argument for the object position and locative argument is a marked one. And when it comes to L1 transfer, Korean EFL learners have a tendency to transfer the argument structures of Korean locative verbs into those of English ones. Thus, these results showed that the L1 argument structure plays an important role in the acquisition of the L2 argument structure.
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