Acquiring the unaccusative unergative distinction in a second language: evidence from English-speaking learners of L2 Chinese

It has been proposed that intransitive verbs can be divided into two subgroups, unaccusative verbs, such as “break” and “arrive,” and unergative verbs, such as “laugh” and “swim”; the former type has an internal but no external argument, whereas the latter type has an external but no internal argument. Unaccusative verbs are verbs of change of state or location, while unergative verbs are a set of agentive monadic verbs of manner of motion. English and Chinese differ in the mapping between semantics and syntax in the domain of unaccusativity. In English, the internal argument of the unaccusative verb has to raise to subject position to be Case-marked. In Chinese, however, the internal argument can remain in object position and get inherent partitive case as long as it is an indefinite NP. External arguments of unergative verbs in both English and Chinese are in a preverbal position whether they are definite or indefinite.