An Asymmetric Theory of Korean Ditransitives: Evidence from Idioms

This paper argues that the [Dat-Acc] and the [Acc-Acc] orders in Korean are the representations of the postpositional dative construction and the double object construction and that their syntactic structures are asymmetric. I apply the same syntactic diagnostics (nominalization and idioms) developed for English by Bruening (2010) to the data in Korean, and discuss in a greater detail that the asymmetric properties of nominalization and idioms call for Bruening’s (2010) asymmetric analysis.