Syntactic Causatives in Korean : Clause Union or Not?

Clause Union Laws require causee nominals to assume the relation of direct object or indirect object depending on the transitivity of corresponding non-causative constructions (Perlmutter & Postal 1974) or in accordance with the language specific rules (Gibson & Raposo 1986) in forming causative constructions. However, the causee nominals in Korean syntactic causatives are nominatively, accusatively or datively marked regardless of the transitivity of corresponding non-causative constructions. This paper argues that this intriguing case marker alternation is due to the interaction of the subcategorization of the verb ha with Subject-to-Object Raising, not the reflection of causative unions as argued in Gerdts (1990) and Kim (1990).