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Second Language Acquisition of Turkish
Edited by Ayşe Gürel
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 59] 2016
► pp. 107–133

The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish under the Feature Reassembly Approach

ORCID logo | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

According to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009), L2 learners must acquire, reassembly, or reconfigure features into lexical items in the L2 from the way represented and bundled in their L1. This study extends this approach to the acquisition of two classes of causative verbs – change of state verbs with agentive subjects (kırmak-break) and psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects (korkutmak-frighten) in L2 Turkish by L1 speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese. The results of a picture judgment task with transitive and intransitive sentences manipulating overt/non-overt morphology on the verbs showed that the L2 learners’ judgments were constrained by the morphological patterns of the learners’ L1s, experiencing different degrees of difficulty with the lexical realization of those features.

Keywords: causative morphology, Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, Turkish
Published online: 25 May 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.59.05mon
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