the present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of english unaccusative verbs. through employing the questionnaire originally used by ju, (2000), 206 iranian intermediate and advanced english majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

This study used fMRI to inform a debate between two theories concerning the representation of reflexive verbs. Reflexives are verbs that denote an action that the subject applies on herself (e.g., The woman stretched). These verbs are derived by a lexical operation that creates a reflexive from its transitive counterpart. Theories differ with respect to which thematic role is reduced by the lex...

............................................................................................................................... 1 1 Introducing inanimate unergatives ...................................................................................... 2 1.1 The domain of intransitive verbs ..................................................................................... 2 1.2 The domain of...

Unaccusativity, or split intransitivity, refers to the generalization that intransitive verbs divide into two subclasses, unaccusatives and unergatives. While the core arguments of unaccusatives share common properties with direct objects of transitive verbs, the core arguments of unergatives do so with transitive subjects. The Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978; Burzio 1986) accounts for...

SV sentences with unaccusative verbs like The leaf fell involve movement from object to subject position. This line of studies tested whether young children can produce this movement and whether they represent SV sentences with unaccusatives as derived by movement. In Hebrew, unaccusatives appear in both SV and VS orders. This optionality allows for the testing of the acquisition of object-to-s...

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating una...

This paper argues that the term ‘passive’ has been systematically misapplied to a class of impersonal constructions that suppress the realization of a syntactic subject. The reclassification of these constructions highlights a typological contrast between two types of verbal diathesis and clarifies the status of putative ‘passives of unaccusatives ’ and ‘transitive passives’ in Balto-Finnic and...

In the realm of causativization, the traditional tension between explaining crosslinguistic variation while maintaining that a phenomenon has a common universal source can be stated specifically as follows: how can we explain the fact that if a certain type of verb causativizes in both languages A and B, the derived predicate usually has the same syntactic and semantic properties, while also ac...

The processability account anticipates that learners will make more underpassivization errors than overpassivization since passivization entails processing. Although one study on psych-verbs and a few unaccusatives examined Turkish L2 learners’ acquisition, no research compared single set of acquisitions these verbs together from processing point view. In this regard, the current aims to invest...