The Acquisition of the Thematic Roles of the English Verb Open by College Students

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the acquisition of the English verb open and its thematic roles in L2 English by Korean learners. First, the Korean learners in the study did not give support to the subject hierarchies of Larson (1988), Grimshaw (1990), Dowty (1991), and Saeed (2009) and exhibited the following order in the experiment of the thematic roles of open and yelta 'open': Agent > Goal > Instrument. We have contended that the learners’ subject hierarchy (agent > goal > instrument) should be represented in the core grammar since it comes from the learners’ cognition and it is supported by the synchronic computational system (the British National Corpus). Second, the results of our experiment clearly illustrate the fact that the Korean learners do entertain the hypothesis that learners look for similarities whenever they can find them, but they do not respect Chomsky's UG theory since the acquisition of English thematic roles by the Korean learners takes place through positive transfer and negative transfer of their native thematic roles. Third, we have argued in this paper that when all three thematic roles (agent, instrument, and goal) appear within a sentence, the Korean learners judged the order of English thematic roles in accordance with their L1, namely transfer, since the orders of the three thematic roles that the English verb open allows are a subset of the orders that the Korean verb yelta 'open' allows (the Superset Principle). Additionally, we have claimed that our subject hierarchy captures the order of acquisition of subject functions and reflects the degree of markedness which correlates with the order of acquisition. Finally, we have maintained that agent subjects and goal subjects are absolutely universal subject functions which are governed by UG, whereas instrument subjects are subject functions that lie outside UG.