The Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis – a Preliminary Study on Acquisition of Unaccusatives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/uns_evkonyv.2022.9Keywords:
unaccusativity, unaccusative trap, Hungarian, SerbianAbstract
Some time ago, research in ESL/EFL shed light on a series of phenomena that would probably have remained hidden if it were not for the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Pelmutter, 1978). Namely, it became apparent that students who start learning English as a foreign language often do not immediately distinguish unaccusative verbs from unegratives, thus generate ungrammatical syntactic structures. This linguistic behavior implied that there are multiple stages in grammatical development in adult L2 grammar that leads to the acquisition of grammatically correct English verb structures and related syntactic structures. Oshita (2001) named this process Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis. In my article I am interested in whether this hypothesis applies to Serbian native speakers learning Hungarian as a foreign language, since Hungarian exhibits certain unaccusative phenomena.
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