Acquisition of Entailment Relations in Korean Causatives

Abstract

This study investigates whether two Korean causative types (morphological and syntactic) have the same entailment properties in adult and child Korean. Patterson (1974) claims that only the morphological causative entails the occurrence of the caused event, while Kim’s (2005) experimental study found no such entailment for either type of causatives. In this study, a Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain and McKee 1985; Crain and Thornton 1998) was conducted with sixteen Korean-speaking adults and showed that the entailment relation is required for the morphological causative. Twenty-five Korean-speaking children participated in the same task and behaved similarly to adults in that they rejected the morphological causative when the caused event did not take place. On the other hand, it was revealed that some children were sensitive to the type of causation depicted in the task, independent of the entailment properties. They showed a tendency to link the morphological causative only when it was associated with direct causation, but not with indirect causation. This observed difference between adults and children may be explained by the Iconicity Principle (Haiman 1983), which predicts the morphological causative to be associated with direct causation, and the syntactic causative with indirect causation.