THE CAUSATIVE/INCOATIVE ALTERNATION IN SPANISH AS L1 AND L2

Unaccusative verbs do not form a homogeneous class concerning to the syntactic constructions in which they may appear. In this respect, there are change of state unaccusatives that alternate in transitivity (romper 'break'), others have a suppletive causative counterpart for the transitive form (morir- matar 'kill'), while still others do not alternate ad do not have lexically unrelated counterparts (escapar 'escape') (Montrul, 1999). Maia (2010) documented that monolingual Brazilian Portuguese-speakers rejects unaccusative constructions with reflexive clitic pronoun 'se'. The present study investigates change of state unaccusative verbs in panish' advanced Interlanguage of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and English native speakers. The purpose is to comprehend how native speakers of two typological distinct languages - BP and English - judges the acceptability of sentences with or without reflexive clitic 'se'. Results suggest that BP and English (L1) learners of panish seem to have acquired the unaccusative morphological marker - clitic se - at this level of interlanguage. It is argued that transfer might not operate uniformly in all linguistic domains in interlanguage grammars (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996).