“Conceptualizable Agent” revisited: A critical evaluation of theoretical construct, testing design, and account of Overpassivization

Abstract

Overpassivization errors such as *My mother was died have attracted L2 researchers’ attention since the 1970s. The most influential account of this phenomenon to date, the Conceptualizable Agent analysis, attributes its cause to language users’ discourse-pragmatic perspective on described events. The analysis has been widely supported with experimental data but the original study that introduced the concept of conceptualizable agent has never been subjected to close and critical examination. The current paper evaluates its basic assumptions, experimental design, interpretation of data, and theoretical and empirical implications, including the developmental pattern of Overpassivization and its predicted existence in L2 Chinese. We show that Overpassivization is neither caused nor sanctioned by an imaginary agent in discourse contexts and the phenomenon can be more naturally accounted for as learners’ superfluous morphosyntactic marking of NP-movement involved in the derivation of unaccusative sentences. In conclusion, Overpassivization should not be regarded simply as L2 learners’ fickle selection of verb forms based on their conceptualization of events. Instead, this unique error pattern observed in adult L2 English should be analyzed as a small but important piece of a much larger puzzle, i.e., the nonnative acquisition of linguistic properties associated with split intransitivity.