Congratulations to Ha Eun Shim. Last month, she successfully defended her MA thesis. Ha Eun is currently deciding which PhD program to attend this fall. Learn more about her research below, and see the photos featured at bottom taken on the day of the defence. Well done, Ha Eun! 

Title

The Grammaticality Status of the Double Object Construction in Korean Ditransitive Structures: an Experimental Investigation

Abstract

Theoretical studies on Korean ditransitive structures have primarily treated postpositional dative construction (PDC) and double object construction (DOC) as grammatical alternatives. However, recent experimental findings challenge this view: DOCs are judged highly unacceptable, produced infrequently, and rarely attested in corpora. This imbalance raises a fundamental question: Does Korean truly possess two distinct ditransitive structures? This thesis addresses this issue by empirically testing the grammatical status of the Korean DOC by means of two acceptability judgment task experiments. The first experiment tested the effects of scrambling and verb semantics in improving the acceptability of DOCs. The findings revealed that DOCs are judged highly unacceptable regardless of verb semantics and scrambling. The second experiment tested whether the use of DOCs has undergone language change by comparing the acceptability across age groups. The findings revealed that DOCs are judged highly unacceptable regardless of age groups.

Keywords

Ditransitive; double object construction; postpositional dative construction; acceptability judgment; language change; Korean 

About the student

Ha Eun Shim received a BA in English Language & Literature from Ewha Womans University (Summa Cum Laude). Her first role was as a research assistant for Prof. Jinwook Choi at Seoul National University in the Medical Informatics Lab, where she gained hands-on experience in applying computational linguistics to real-world settings through NLP projects. Following that, Ha Eun joined Prof. Sujin Yang's A Growing Experience Lab in the Psychology Department, where she assisted with projects on human-computer interaction, learning various experimental methods such as fNIRS. She was also fortunate to work on research projects in syntax and corpus linguistics with Prof. Hye-Won Choi. 

Exam committee

• Dr. Chung-hye Han (Supervisor)
• Dr. Henny Yeung 
• Dr. Keir Moulton (External examiner)