Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/61118

The purpose of this study is to apply the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (henceforth, MDH), proposed by Eckman (1977), to the analysis of the learning difficulty of dative and accusative cases in Japanese and Korean. The MDH claims that the areas of difficulty that a language learner has can be predicted in terms of the difference in typological markedness of these areas between the native language and the target language. This study argues that the notion of typological markedness should be replaced with the frequency-based notion of markedness in order to apply the MDH to the analysis of the learning difficulty of grammatical cases/postpositions. I use the data from Sejong Korean-Japanese Bilingual Corpora to determine the frequency-based markedness of Korean and Japanese dative and accusative cases and the data from KY corpus and C-JAS of Korean Japanese-learners to reveal their learning difficulties. Herein, the analysis of the data suggests that Korean Japanese-learners have difficulty in acquiring dative objects, as predicted by MDH.