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.

The English dative alternation, which involves an alternation between the double object construction (DC) and the adpositional construction (AC), has been known to be one of the most problematic areas for L2 learners. This paper investigates the factors influencing the Korean English as a foreign language learners’ choices between the two constructions. The Korean section of the TOEFL11 corpus was used and sentences with dative constructions were extracted from the corpus. Nine factors were then encoded and analyzed with a generalized linear mixed-effect model. From the analysis, the following facts were observed: (1) Korean EFL learners’ choice between the DC and the AC was influenced by five factors: animacy of theme, definiteness of theme, pronominality of recipient, length difference between theme and recipient, and individual verbs; (2) despite some similarities in choice of alternation between Korean EFL learners and ENL speakers, the two groups also exhibited differences, and (3) these differences originated from the different effects of these factors.