An experimental study on the production of the double accusative ditransitives in Korean

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to revisit the production of the Korean ditransitive constructions reported in Park & Yi (2021). The phenomenon is puzzling particularly because the double accusative ditransitive construction tends to be judged highly unacceptable and rarely observed in natural language corpora, while speakers produced a non-trivial number of them in an experimental setting. This study attempts to replicate the results of their production experiment on a different pool of participants and with a much larger sample size (N=96). Based on this new dataset, we conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of speakers’ free continuations after two types of prompts, i.e., including either dative- or accusative-marked animate argument as a potential recipient. We examine the validity of the previous results and also discuss a variety of continuations provided by participants and their implications for Korean sentence production.