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Abstract Abstract: The present study attempts to investigate the transitivity of intransive verbs in Chinese EFL learners’ English based on Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners. The results show that the transitivity of intransive verbs is significantly different in Chinese students’ spoken and written English. Chinese learners not only passivize unaccusative verbs, but also use objects after unaccusative verbs, passivize unergative verbs and use objects after unergative verbs. Syntactic properties have no significant effect on the transitivity of intransive verbs but in spoken English semantic properties have a major impact on unaccusative verbs’ transitivity. The results indicate that the differences of argument-structure of intransive verbs in Chinese and English language may result in the transitivity found in the corpus and this conclusion does not support the “Interface Hypothesis”.
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