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Ditransitivity hierarchy, semantic compatibility and the realization of recipients in Korean dative constructions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2020

HANJUNG LEE
HANJUNG LEE*
Affiliation:
Department of English Language & Literature, Sungkyunkwan University, 25-2 Sungkyunkwan-ro, Jongro-ku, Seoul03063, Korea, hanjung@skku.edu
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Abstract

It has been observed that a subset of dative verbs that can express causation of possession such as cwu- ‘give’, ceykongha- ‘offer’ and cikupha- ‘pay’ may be found in the double accusative frame as well as in the DAT(ive)-ACC(usative) frame in Korean. These verbs contrast with transfer of possession verbs such as kennay- ‘hand’ and phal- ‘sell’ and verbs of sending and throwing, which are found in the DAT-ACC frame only. This paper presents a meaning-based account of the limited productivity of the dative/accusative alternation in Korean dative verbs. Building on Croft et al. (2001) and Levin (2004, 2008b), I argue that the semantic classes of dative verbs form an implicational hierarchy pure caused possession > transfer of possession > caused motion, which ranks verbs in terms of the degree of the compatibility with a caused possession event type. I suggest three criteria for compatibility between verb meaning and constructional meaning and show that the analysis of verb–construction pairings proposed here, when combined with an account of variation, provides a unified explanation for verb distribution patterns observed for ditransitive constructions within and across languages and the morphosyntactic expression of recipients of dative verbs in Korean. It accounts for the limited productivity of the dative/accusative alternation in dative verbs in Korean as a consequence of choosing the cut-off point at the highest end of this hierarchy, thus explaining why only the verb class that is most compatible with the caused possession event type, i.e. pure caused possession verbs, may be used ditransitively.

Keywords

argument realizationcase markingconstructional meaningdative verbsditransitivity hierarchypossessionrecipientssemantic compatibilityverb meaning
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 37 - 72
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5A2A01028584). I am particularly grateful to three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for their valuable comments and suggestions. It goes without saying that all inadequacies and errors are entirely my own.

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