By adopting a usage-based approach to language acquisition, this study investigated the emergence and development of L2 constructional knowledge. A total of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs) and their associated verbs were extracted from a learner corpus and three verbal fluency tasks, each conducted in L1 and L2 English and L1 Korean. We compared verb usage in the target VACs across proficiency levels between the L1 and L2 groups and between data types for VAC productivity and verb-VAC associations. The results identified three stages through which Korean learners’ VAC knowledge develops in L2 English: emerging through the frequent use of a few general verbs, expanding the range of verbs associated with a VAC to include more specific and prototypical verb types, and then developing them into a creative constructional schema. Moreover, we determined similarities between L1 and L2 English VAC knowledge in higher L2 proficiency levels, as well as L1 Korean influences related to L1 typology and L1 collocational transfer.

This study investigates individual verb differences in Korean learners‟ use of English non-alternating unaccusatives as well as the factors that influence various errors. Specifically, it focuses on the effects of L1 transfer and animacy of subjects on overpassivization errors. Concordance lines from a learner corpus consisting of 6,572 essays written by Korean college-level learners were analyzed to observe the syntactic distribution across ten non-alternating unaccusative verbs. The results revealed that overpassivization errors show disproportionate dispersion across the ten unaccusative verbs, and that Korean L1 influence is not a significant factor while inanimate subjects influence overpassivization. Furthermore, salient error patterns such as transitivization and overgenerated be were identified from the Korean learners‟ use of unaccusative verbs. This study proposes that some unaccusative verbs are more susceptible to overpassivization errors, and that Korean learners of English will benefit from being able to identify the factors contributing to errors for each unaccusative verb.