Definiteness and context in double-accusative ditransitives in Korean: An experimental approach

This study explores how definiteness and contextual information influence theacceptability and processing of the Korean double-accusative ditransitive construction. Experiment 1 employed an acceptability judgment task, demonstrating that theacceptability of the construction is significantly enhanced when the recipient is markedwith the definite ku and introduced by prior context, highlighting the role of definitenesssupported by context. Experiment 2 utilized a self-paced reading paradigm to investigatethe online processing of the construction, revealing that the presence of context facilitatesfaster reading times at critical regions, particularly at the recipient and theme arguments. Combining the results of the two experiments, it is notable that while contextualfacilitation improves processing, it results in only modest improvements in acceptabilityratings. We interpret the results as indicating that the double-accusative ditransitiveconstruction is grammatically marginal despite being relatively easy to comprehend whensupported by definiteness and context. These findings contribute to our understandingof the double-accusative ditransitive construction in Korean and show an interestinginterplay between acceptability and sentence processing.