Acquiring the English Causative Alternation: Evidence from the University of Jordan

Aseel Zibin ,Abdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.3p.7

Aseel Zibin , Abdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh

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https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.3p.7

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Abstract

The main objective of the current study was to test whether Advanced Jordanian EFL learners have acquired the English causative alternation. To this end, we used a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) to determine whether the participants would be able distinguish between alternating and non-alternating causative/inchoative verbs. The verbs used in the GJT were chosen based on their frequency in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The sample of the study consisted of eighty advanced Jordanian EFL learners, studying English Language and Literature at the University of Jordan. The results revealed that the participants have not acquired the English causative alternation (total mean=61%). Specifically, the results showed that the participants encountered some difficulties with certain verbs that do not alternate and were used ungrammatically on the GJT. We proposed that these difficulties could be attributed to the differences between English and Jordanian Arabic (JA) in terms of the semantically-based constraints that govern the causative-inchoative alternation in English and JA. The participants transferred the argument structure of verbs in JA into English without realising that the two languages are different in terms of the verbs that are allowed to alternate and those that are not. The study concludes with recommendations for further research. Keywords : C

Highlights

The causative-inchoative alternation has been subject to wide debate in the last couple of decades (Pinker; 1989; Croft, 1990; Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1994; Wolff, 2003; Koontz-Garboden, 2009; Haspelmath et al, 2014; among others)
Using a Grammaticality Judgement Task (GJT), this study aims to investigate the ability of Jordanian EFL learners to distinguish between alternating and non-alternating verbs in English
The question here is: would Jordanian EFL learners be able to decide which English verbs alternate and which do not? the current study aims at providing answers to the following research questions: 1) Can advanced Jordanian EFL learners distinguish between verbs that alternate between the causative and inchoative structures in English and those that do not?

Summary

Introduction

The causative-inchoative alternation has been subject to wide debate in the last couple of decades (Pinker; 1989; Croft, 1990; Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1994; Wolff, 2003; Koontz-Garboden, 2009; Haspelmath et al, 2014; among others) Research in this area has focused mainly on the rules that allow some verbs to alternate between two types of structure. Example (1b), on the other hand, shows the transitive variant of the verb shrink, which describes the cause that brought about the change of state It is called the causative variant (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2011, Horvath & Siloni, 2013; among others) the main problem in this type of alternation lies in the fact that not all intransitive verbs have associated causative transitive forms (Pinker, 1989; Haegeman, 1991). The verb smile can only be used inchoatively, as in (2a):

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