• Soodeh Sadat Hejazian Yazdi

  Author

• Mohammad Javad Rezai

  Author

Acquisition of verbs and their syntactic properties can act as the core of any sentence
across languages. EFL learners encounter learnability problems in the acquisition of transitivity
structures manifested by different verbs. The present study intended to explore the fundamental
problems Persian EFL learners may face while trying to acquire the transitivity constructions
along with the related argument and predicate relationships. The role of cross-linguistic
influence and proficiency level were among the other aims of the current study. To this end, 99
Persian EFL learners and eight English native speakers were given a completion test using
appropriate internal nominal arguments if needed. The results showed that in the verbs which
were optionally transitive in both English and Persian (OEP), the participants had the highest
performance in producing transitive structures. Additionally, the role of L1 (Persian) was
detected in the acquisition of those verbs which were optionally transitive verbs in English but
monotransitive in Persian (OEMP) where the majority of EFL participants preferred to use
transitive structures.

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