本研究，基於分辨非賓存現動詞及瞭解二語學習者如何讓習得此類動詞之需求，旨在分析一個高頻率之非賓格存現動詞 HAPPEN與其三個同義字(OCCUR，APPEAR，與EXIST)和中文同義字「發生」從語言使用者角度作比較。採用了母語語料庫 (英文採用英國國家語料庫 BNC；中文採用十億詞語料庫 GW 2.0)及學習者語料庫(含語言訓練與測驗中心學習者語料庫the LTTC，國際英語學習者語料庫the ICLE，及政治大學外語學習者語料庫the NCCU)作為第一部分的語料庫分析。此外，為了探索二語英文錯誤及母語中文遷移的關係，我們也進行了以語料庫為基礎的心理語言學實驗(兩個關於中英文HAPPEN句子結構的接受度判斷測驗)。 本研究結果發現，其一，就語料庫中的文法形式(Grammatical form)來分析HAPPEN、OCCUR、APPEAR與EXIST，英文母語語料庫中的高頻文法形式(例如：happened或happen)與學習者語料庫中有相同的現象。然而大部份的高頻文法形式都是二語學習者經常誤用之處，且容易與兩個常見非賓動詞錯誤—過度被動化錯誤(Overpassivization)和及物化錯誤(Transitivization)—共現(Collocated)。其二，從語料庫錯誤分析各種錯誤類型得知， HAPPEN與OCCUR較常出現過度被動化錯誤；APPEAR與 EXIST較常有及物化錯誤。此結果顯示每個非賓存現動詞可能會犯不同錯誤，也因此造成其錯誤的原因有所不同。其三，從分析心理語言實驗結果得知，我們發現母語中文文法句型(L1 Chinese grammatical patterns)，例如：「V-了」－「出現了」；抑或是「V+N」－「發生車禍」、「發生戰爭」、「存在缺失」，都影響了二語學習者對英文非賓動詞之文法形式的正確判定。由此揭示了母語中文大多都對二語英文非賓動詞習得有所干擾。 基於所得結果，我們提出「完成體」(Perfectivity)及「及物性」(Transitivity)之不同來探討中英文間存現動詞用法之異同，並試著解釋造成二語非賓動詞學習複雜化的原因。 此研究克服了過去文獻中比較非賓存現動詞之困難也透過語料庫結合心理實驗研究法提供對非賓動詞習得之解釋方法。這些發現可進一步作為詮釋非賓動詞的假說，並將其應用於語言教材設計或被視為未來跨語言分析研究之基石。 / Owing to the necessity to identify unaccusative existence/appearance verbs and realize how they are acquired by L2 learners, this present thesis aims to analyze a highly frequent English unaccusative verb HAPPEN and compare it with its three other synonyms (OCCUR, APPEAR, and EXIST), as well as its Chinese counterpart發生 fāshēn ‘happen.’ Native speaker corpora (the British National Corpus (BNC) for English and Chinese Gigaword 2 Corpus (GW 2.0) for the Chinese), and L2 learner corpora (the Language Training and Testing Learner Corpus (the LTTC), International Corpus of Learner English 2.0 (the ICLE), and the National Chengchi University Foreign Language Learner Corpus (the NCCU)) are utilized to analyze the unaccusative verbs in the first main section. In addition, in order to discover the relationship between L2 English errors and L1 Chinese transfer, psycholinguistic experiments (two acceptability judgments tasks with comparable Chinese and English HAPPEN sentence constructions) based on the corpora data were conducted in this thesis. The results in this thesis showed that, first, the highly frequent grammatical forms of unaccusative verbs (e.g., happened or happen) in the English native speaker corpus share some similarities with those of L2 learner corpora. However, these grammatical forms were usually misused by L2 learners and were frequently collocated with the two common unaccusative errors (overpassivization, e.g., *What is happened? and trasitivization, e.g., *I happen a car accident.). Second, as for the distributions of unaccusative error types, HAPPEN and OCCUR were found to mainly co-occur with overpassivization errors, whereas APPEAR and EXIST were found to mainly co-occur with transitivization errors. This indicates that each unaccusative verb may have different potential for L2 unaccusative errors, and therefore the causes of these errors with different verbs may vary. Third, from the analysis of psycholinguistic experiments, we discover that the L1 Chinese grammatical patterns, such as the V-le grammatical pattern (e.g., 出現了chūxiànle ‘appear-le’) and the V+N grammatical pattern (e.g., 發生車禍fāshēngchēhuò ‘The car accident happened’, 發生戰爭 fāshēngzhànzhēng ‘The war occurred’, and存在缺失 cúnzàiquēshī ‘The pitfalls existed’) may influence L2 learners’ correct judgment as to the grammatical forms of unaccusative verbs. This reveals that generally L1 Chinese might have some interference with L2 unaccusative acquisition. Based on the results, we proposed that the perfectivity and transitivity differences between English and Chinese unaccusative existence/appearance verbs could distinguish the uses among the English HAPPEN and the Chinese發生 fāshēn ‘happen’ with their synonyms. These differences could also provide a possible reason for the cause of the problematic L2 unaccusative acquisition. This thesis overcomes the difficulties of comparing unaccusative existence/appearance verbs in the previous studies and attempts to unravel the enigma of acquiring this verb type from the integrated corpus-based and empirical findings. These findings in turn serve as the suggested assumptions to interpret unaccusative verbs, which can be applied to the design of language teaching materials or can be viewed as the basis of cross-language analysis in the future studies.