Abstract：Abstract: In view of the debate on usage-based and rule-based language acquisition approach and by referring to a two-way alternation mechanism, we took English causative alternation verbs as a focus of study and examined under-passivization and over-causativisation errors made by high and low level Chinese college students with a mixed design variance analysis. Results show that both levels’ under-passivization and over-causativisation errors of some verb classes were influenced by entrenchment effect in real verbs’ grammatical judgement task, others were not affected because their narrow-range rules were either fully or badly acquired due to different semantic constraints. Meanwhile，the high level was affected by the abstract event meaning of verb mini-constructions, while the low level was affected by the lexical meaning of verbs and their mother tongue rules. Moreover, both levels were influenced by preemption effect in nonce verbs’ grammatical judgement task, but the high and low levels were respectively affected by the constructional and lexical meaning. The above findings indicate the acquisition of the causative alternation verbs conforms to a joint usage-based and rule-based approach.
Key words: entrenchment; preemption; semantics; causative alternation; under-passivization; over-causativisation
