Acquisition of unaccusativity: re-examining the ‘unergative misanalysis hypothesis’

This paper re-examines the empirical data taken to support the unergative misanalysis of unaccusative verbs in L1 acquisition. Two types of data are discussed: acquisition of the Genitive of negation in Russian (Babyonyshev et al. 2001) and Nominative case drop in the acquisition of Japanese (Machida et al. 2004). I show that the authors’ interpretation of the data cannot be maintained. Furthermore, I show that upon a careful examination, the very findings taken to support the unergative misanalysis of unaccusatives actually point in the opposite direction, namely that unaccusatives are assigned the correct syntactic representation from the onset of acquisition.