The Lexical-Based Account of L2 Acquisition of English Double Objects and Their Corresponding Passives by Korean Speakers

Constructionists have claimed that seemingly homogeneous goals and benefactives in English are grammatically different and that such divergence is attributed to grammatical differences between the two that goal verbs are inherently ditransitive verbs whereas benefactive verbs are transitive verbs and in this regard, goal constructions are more typical than benefactive constructions. This paper examines implications of such a claim with Korean speakers, using the Magnitude Estimation. The lexical-based account advanced by the constructionists falls short of accounting for the results. This paper shows that the results are best explained by the L1 transfer-based account.