Korean-speaking Adults` and Children`s Interpretation of Causatives = Korean-speaking Adults` and Children`s Interpretation of Causatives

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study investigates whether two Korean causative types (morphological and syntactic) have the same entailment properties in adult and child Korean. A Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain & Thornton, 1998) was conducted with sixteen adults and showed that the entailment relation is required for the morphological causative. Twenty-five children participated in the same task and behaved similarly to adults in that they rejected the morphological causative when the caused event did not occur. On the other hand, it was revealed that some children were sensitive to the type of causation depicted in the task. 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.