Task four -- EnglishtextsM

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Date Posted: 12:25:34 06/19/07 Tue
Author: Stela Spinola
Subject: Task four

Task four- argumentative essay

On ergative verbs in English

The text I am basing myself on, �Grammatical counciousness- raising and learnability, by Virginia Yip, presents a reseach with EFL/ESL students on the learnability of a particular problematic structure in English, called Ergative verbs. Before goign on in the description of the data from this research, let us analyse what ergative verbs happens to be. Observe the following sentences:

a. The kids eat early.( intransitive)
b. The window broke.( intransitive, ergative)
c. The ship sank. (intransitive, ergative)
d. The mirror shattered during the last earthquake. ( intransitive, ergative)

As we can observe, ergative constructions differ from the simple intransitive
ones in that they usually don�t select an object and the subject suffers the action described in the sentence, even though they are not presented or understood as reflexives. In the author�s words they �denote processes that lack volitional control. They look like active intransitive verbs in that they subcathegorize for a single noun phrase.(...) A further distinction arises from the fact that some ergatives such as break also occur as transitive verbs, that is, they have two alternative subcategorization frames, while verbs such as happen can only occur as ergatives.� (Yip, 2001)
According to the research findings, in the grmmatical judjement test many students rejected senteces like �d�as grammatical , what was extended to many ergative constructions as well. The majority of the corrections made by the students on such sentences reveal a tendency to treat ergatives constructions as passives, and according to the author, �the fact that learners prefer the passive version suggests that they might be intreperting ergatives of both types as underlying transitives (since only transitive verbs allow passivization in English).� (Yip, 2001)
However, the cause of the misunderstanding and the difficulties in acquiring such structure might lie on the fact that ergatives pesent a subject which is uncapable of action, even though it occupies the position of agent in the sentence. A supported by Yip (2001), � Learner�s treatment of ergatives as if they were passives may be seen as a reflection of the typological organization of English, in which grammatical relations are based on the nominative - accusative system. In this system, the semantic role of �agent�normally corresponds to the grammatical function subject, that of theme or patient to the grammatical function object (cf Marantz 1984).�
Neverhteless, the misinterpretation of ergative constructions might not only be due to the particular syntactic and semantic aspects of this kind of construction, that are diverget from the cannonical sentence, where subject responds for the function �agent�, in which passives are the exception. The cause of confusion might be that the subject of ergatives is utterly and visibly uncapable of action by the simple reason that it is an innanimate being. This statement can be proved by the fact that either natives and non- natives speakers of English don�t treat ergative subjects as capable also of undergo reflexive. In other words, sentences such as � The window broke.� are never interpreted as �The window broke itself�, regardeless of the level of proficiency, since the action of a window breaking itself is semantically impossible across languages.
To conclude, we can see that the difficulties in acquiring ergative verbs in English are mainly due to the unusual features in sentences that contain it, namely because suh verbs semantically select a subjec which cannot be agent, since it usually is a innanimate being, while in the cannonical sentences the subject coincides with that of semantic role agent. As seen, my point can be easily proved by the impossibilit of turning an ergative into reflexive, since the action expressed in the sentence is always caused by an external agent, even though it is not always explicit or easily interpretable as such. A good example of ergative that presents an exception to this is sentence �d�, in which one can easily conclude that the event of shattering is the result of the eathquake
-- even though being the semantically interpretable subject it appears just as an adverbial.

Bibliographical references:

Yip, Virginia; Grammatical counciousness-raising and learnability. In: Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar, edited by Terence Odlin. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Re: Task four -- Houssam Zahreddine peer editing to Stela Spinola, 17:14:23 06/19/07 Tue