Ordering a Left-branching Language: Heaviness vs. Givenness

This paper investigates ordering alternation phenomena in Korean using the dative construction data from Sejong Corpus of Modern Korean (Kim, 2000). The paper first shows that syntactic weight and information structure are distinct and independent factors that influence word order in Korean. Moreover, it reveals that heaviness and givenness compete each other and exert diverging effects on word order, which contrasts the converging effects of these factors shown in word orders of right-branching languages like English. The typological variation of syntactic weight effect poses interesting theoretical and empirical questions, which are discussed in relation to processing efficiency in ordering.