This paper adopts a multi-factorial analysis and investigates English dative alternations in Korean EFL learners’ writings, by directly comparing dative alternations of native speakers and those of Korean EFL learners’ writings. Two corpora were chosen for the comparison: the Switchboard corpus (written sections) and the Korean component of the TOEFL11 corpus. After all the sentences with dative alternations were extracted from these two corpora, and seventeen linguistic factors were manually encoded, the data were statistically analyzed in R. This paper was theoretically based on the concept of interlanguage in the Second Language Acquisition and Competition Model of Bates and MacWhinney (1982, 1989). Through the analysis, the following facts were observed: (i) the Korean EFL learners used ditransitive constructions more frequently than prepositional constructions, (ii) eight main factors and four interactions with the L1 were statistically significant, and (iii) the ditransitive constructions which the Korean EFL learners used were closer to the prepositional constructions rather than the ditransitive constructions in Korean.

This paper discusses the phenomenon of dative alternation in English, and presents syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic explanations to the choice between dative structure and double object structure. It will be argued that a unified explanation encompassing the discourse variables based on the corpus analysis in Williams (1994) and Bresnan and Nikitina (2008) as well as the syntactic structure suggested in Larson (1988) and the typology of verbs in Krifka (2003) is needed to explain the diversity of the dative alternation.