Individual Verb Differences in Chinese Learners’Acquisition of English Non alternating Unaccusatives

Individual verb differences in L2 acquisition of English unaccusatives have been neglected by previous studies. This study focuses on such differences by investigating Chinese learners through the combined use of a written production task, an acceptability judgment task, interviews and a textbook corpus survey. It finds that there are significant individual verb differences in Chinese learners’ acquisition of English non alternating unaccusatives. It suggests that the differences are mainly caused by varied lexical frequencies and teachers’ explicit instructions.