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

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