Abstract：Abstract: Since monadic unaccusative and unergative verbs with causative forms have been added to inchoative verbs, it is essential to reconsider the acquisition of inchoative verbs. The past research didn’t explore overpassivization of inchoative verbs based on the comparison of form-function mapping differences between inchoative and passive constructions, while this research uses mixed design variance experiment to prove that Chinese college students would violate discourse principles and make overpassivization errors in contexts that inchoatives should be preferred, and overpassivization of high and low level students are both influenced by the prototypical association between transitive scene and construction encoding. Low level students are also influenced by entrenchment and statistical preemption effects, thus tend to make less errors with high frequency verbs than low frequency ones, and less errors with monadic unaccusative and unergative, which have higher contingency with inchoative construction, than dyadic unaccusative. Like the native speakers, high level students are not influenced by semantics and frequency, because they manage to possess the psychological reality of abstract constructions, however, their distance from native speakers indicates that different usages of similar constructions cannot be acquired through mere accumulation of implicit knowledge, therefore this research is partly in support of usage-based construction acquisition theory.
Key words: inchoative verbs; overpassivization; scene-encoding; entrenchment; statistical preemption
