Unaccusative verbs do not form a homogeneous class with respect to the syntactic
constructions in which they may appear. Change of state unaccusatives alternate in
transitivity (romper ‘break’), others have a suppletive
causative counterpart for the transitive variant (morir-matar
‘diekill’), while still others do not alternate and do not have
lexically unrelated counterparts (escapar ‘escape’). It
has been documented that L1 and L2 learners of English use intransitive verbs in
causative contexts (Don't giggle me, Come it closer), due
to the existence of the alternating class. Using a Picture Judgement Task,the
present study investigates whether intermediate Turkish-speaking and
English-speaking learners of Spanish know which unaccusative verbs alternate in
transitivity and which ones do not, and whether they find causative errors natural
with intransitive verbs. Results confirm similar findings to those reported in
English interlanguage and L1 acquisition and suggest that at the level of argument
structure, L1 and L2 acquisition are guided by the same linguistic principles; L1
influence plays a significant role with the reflexive morphology of intransitive
forms. It is argued that transfer might not operate uniformly in all linguistic
domains in interlanguage grammars (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996).
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