On Ditransitive Idioms: With Respect to Korean, Hebrew, and English

Abstract

This paper investigates ditransitive idioms of Korean in comparison with Hebrew and English. It describes the distribution of ditransitive idioms on the basis of fixed- and open-slot dimension, following Mishani-Uval and Siloni (2016), and discusses it in relation to argument structure types, verb types, and the word order. This paper shows that the distribution of idioms is sensitive to verb classification of Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008) (i.e. give- vs. send-type verbs) in all three languages: Fixed-Goal (Open-Theme) idioms and Full idioms (with Fixed-Goal and Fixed-Theme) occur with send-type verbs only in all three languages. Give-type verbs only occur in Fixed-Theme (Open-Goal) idioms. I propose that an analysis that incorporates the idea of verb-sensitivity in structural terms such as Hallman (2015) can account for the similarities and differences in the distribution of ditransitive idioms across the three languages. In doing so, this paper defends (i) Constituency-based approaches to idiom formation and (ii) the base-generation hypothesis for the word order permutation in Korean ditransitives.