This study investigates whether discourse-level referential expectations in an L2 are influenced by construction-linked morphosyntactic form in learners’ L1. We test this question using implicit causality in English and a crosslinguistic contrast between Korean and Chinese, both of which can encode subject-oriented causality with overt causative marking. In a sentence-completion experiment, Korean- and Chinese-speaking learners of English completed causal continuations for English implicit causality verbs whose translation equivalents differed in their L1 construction type. Both groups exhibited stronger subject biases when the corresponding L1 equivalent contained overt causative marking. Chinese learners also showed stronger subject biases for English verbs whose Korean equivalents lacked overt causative marking but whose Chinese equivalents retained it. These findings provide evidence that predicate-level morphosyntactic information in the L1 remains activated and available during L2 discourse interpretation, affecting referential expectations across languages.
