Length and Order: A Corpus Study of Korean Dative-Accusative Construction

This paper examines the word order alternation in the dative-accusative construction in Korean. Using a million word corpus (Spoken portion of Sejong Balanced Modern Korean Corpus, Kim 2000), it shows that the length of arguments is a major factor that affects the syntactic alternation, while admitting that other factors than length are involved in order phenomena. Moreover, it quantitatively testifies to the “long before short” preference of the Korean word order.