The study attempts to investigate how Korean native adult speakers comprehend the distributive function of extrinsic plural marker -tul(EPM) attached to different verb types. It also examines how the three verb types, each of which can evoke a distributive interpretation a collective interpretation and both of the interpretations, influence the sentence interpretation in terms of distributivity. The inconsistency of the previous analyses on the distributivity needs to be verified to shade light on Korean native adult speakers’ knowledge for the extrinsic plural marking from the experimental approach. To do so, the study employed Translation Task, in which the participants were asked to read a story that ends with a sentence to depict a situation. The last sentence was manipulated either to contain EPM attached to three different verb types or not to contain it. And then they were instructed to select any possible translations for the sentence among three choices that correspond to a distributive interpretation, a collective interpretation and both of the interpretations respectively. The results showed that Korean native adult speakers assigned more distributive interpretations to the sentences with EPM than sentences without it. It was also found that there were differences between verb types in evoking distributivity. However, the sentences with EPM also allowed for collective interpretations, which implies that it is not an obligatory distributor but plays a role of a distributive facilitator in the sentence interpretation.

The Korean plural marker tul can be used in a peculiar way. It can not only attach to a nominal expression functioning as a usual plural marker, but it can also, rather unusually, attach to other types of phrasal category. Semantically, when used in the latter way, it brings to the discourse context a sense of distributivity which is rather weak – weak to the extent that truth conditions are sometimes unaffected by its presence. In this article, I derive these properties of extrinsic tul from two proposals: (i) extrinsic tul comes with a silent anaphoric element; and (ii) it conventionally implicates the existence of a distributive relation between the host phrase of tul and its plural antecedent.