Introduction

The acquisition of argument structure and transitivity has been a major area of research in first language acquisition. Argument structure is generally analyzed in terms of the semantic and syntactic relations that hold between a verb and its core arguments at the lexical and clausal levels. At the lexical level, a transitive verb can be defined empirically as one that is usually used with two core arguments, prototypically an agent acting upon a patient. At the clausal level, the grammar of transitivity encompasses the devices (e.g. word order, casemarking and verbal affixes) that are involved in treating the two core arguments as belonging to particular grammatical categories, such as subject and object. While most linguistic analyses of argument structure and transitivity have focused on the levels of lexicon and clause, my work on the acquisition of Korean is based on the assumption that a full understanding of argument structure requires consideration of an additional level, namely, discourse.

The discourse-functional approach that I have pursued draws upon almost three decades of functionally and typologically oriented research on grammar that uses discourse data – transcriptions of audio- or video-taped interactions of language use – as the basis for analyzing grammatical systems and formulating grammatical theory (e.g. Chafe, 1994; Du Bois, 1987, Givón, 1979). The most basic assumption of this approach is that the structure of grammars is shaped by the communicative pressures and cognitive limitations involved in language use.