Since Perlmutter's “Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis” (1978), it has been accepted that intransitive verbs fall into two subclasses - unergative verbs and unaccusative verbs, each associated with a particular argument structure. The unaccusative-unergative dichotomy has also been ...
Since Perlmutter's “Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis” (1978), it has been accepted that intransitive verbs fall into two subclasses - unergative verbs and unaccusative verbs, each associated with a particular argument structure. The unaccusative-unergative dichotomy has also been linked to differences in the phonetic constructions in which they appear. Some linguistic analyses (Selkirk 1995, Iwrin 2010) claim that the placement of pitch accents is determined by the verb-argument structure of the intransitive sentences in a broad focus context. Hirsch & Wagner (2011), on the other hand, claim that once information structure is controlled, the argument structure does not in itself influence prominence in intransitive sentences. This study aimed to investigate the intonational realization of sentences including the two types of intransitive verbs, comparing native speakers of English and Korean learners of English who were divided into two groups ? an advanced group and a beginner group - according to a grammaticality judgment test on intransitive verbs. In this study, two approaches were applied to the experiments: the argument structure approach, and the information structure approach. When the argument structure was controlled, the prosodic and acoustic analyses showed that English native speakers produced similar intonation patterns to a previous study (Hoskins, 1996). Meanwhile, when the sentences were both semantically and phonetically matched, the patterns were contrary to the previous study. Therefore, the argument structure approach is insufficient for the explanation of accentuation of intransitive sentences in broad contexts. The results also support Hirsch & Wagner's proposal (2011), topicality: the animacy of argument and the lexical meaning of appearance/disappearance have influence on the intonation patterns in intransitive sentences. Consequently the subject-accent patterns in the sentences which include human subjects or verbs of appearance were relatively stronger than in sentences with non-human subjects or the verb of disappearance. In the case of the two groups of Korean learners of English, however, they both had a tendency to produce the pitch accent on subjects regardless of the type of intransitive verbs. Furthermore, their syntactic knowledge of English intransitive verbs did not seem to directly influence the intonational realization once they fully understood the meaning of the sentences at the time of utterance. From the view of information structure, Korean speakers could, to some degree, differentiate the prosodic pattern in the sentences which were controlled by animacy. Interestingly, the beginner group was more likely to produce the pitch accent similar to native speakers than the advanced group in those intransitive sentences, particularly in the sentence including an unaccusative verb. It can be assumed that there occurred a conflict between syntactic knowledge of the intransitive sentence of L2 and lexical information of L1 when the sentences were being produced. Although Korean speakers seemed to be able to recognize the difference between human and non-human, unlike native speakers of English they failed to differentiate the prosodic patterns of appearance and disappearance. Finally, this study suggests that for the effective teaching of intonation for Korean learners of English, developing teaching models based on the information status - for instance, thematic role, animacy, new-given information - will be more helpful and efficient than those based on the syntactic structure.
Since Perlmutter's “Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis” (1978), it has been accepted that intransitive verbs fall into two subclasses - unergative verbs and unaccusative verbs, each associated with a particular argument structure. The unaccusative-unergative dichotomy has also been linked to differences in the phonetic constructions in which they appear. Some linguistic analyses (Selkirk 1995, Iwrin 2010) claim that the placement of pitch accents is determined by the verb-argument structure of the intransitive sentences in a broad focus context. Hirsch & Wagner (2011), on the other hand, claim that once information structure is controlled, the argument structure does not in itself influence prominence in intransitive sentences. This study aimed to investigate the intonational realization of sentences including the two types of intransitive verbs, comparing native speakers of English and Korean learners of English who were divided into two groups ? an advanced group and a beginner group - according to a grammaticality judgment test on intransitive verbs. In this study, two approaches were applied to the experiments: the argument structure approach, and the information structure approach. When the argument structure was controlled, the prosodic and acoustic analyses showed that English native speakers produced similar intonation patterns to a previous study (Hoskins, 1996). Meanwhile, when the sentences were both semantically and phonetically matched, the patterns were contrary to the previous study. Therefore, the argument structure approach is insufficient for the explanation of accentuation of intransitive sentences in broad contexts. The results also support Hirsch & Wagner's proposal (2011), topicality: the animacy of argument and the lexical meaning of appearance/disappearance have influence on the intonation patterns in intransitive sentences. Consequently the subject-accent patterns in the sentences which include human subjects or verbs of appearance were relatively stronger than in sentences with non-human subjects or the verb of disappearance. In the case of the two groups of Korean learners of English, however, they both had a tendency to produce the pitch accent on subjects regardless of the type of intransitive verbs. Furthermore, their syntactic knowledge of English intransitive verbs did not seem to directly influence the intonational realization once they fully understood the meaning of the sentences at the time of utterance. From the view of information structure, Korean speakers could, to some degree, differentiate the prosodic pattern in the sentences which were controlled by animacy. Interestingly, the beginner group was more likely to produce the pitch accent similar to native speakers than the advanced group in those intransitive sentences, particularly in the sentence including an unaccusative verb. It can be assumed that there occurred a conflict between syntactic knowledge of the intransitive sentence of L2 and lexical information of L1 when the sentences were being produced. Although Korean speakers seemed to be able to recognize the difference between human and non-human, unlike native speakers of English they failed to differentiate the prosodic patterns of appearance and disappearance. Finally, this study suggests that for the effective teaching of intonation for Korean learners of English, developing teaching models based on the information status - for instance, thematic role, animacy, new-given information - will be more helpful and efficient than those based on the syntactic structure.
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