The extrinsic plural marker in Korean: Five studies

This paper presents a series of experiments designed to shed light on some aspects of the use and interpretation of so-called ‘extrinsic -tul’ by child and adult native speakers of Korean. Our findings indicate that this morpheme occurs far less frequently than the intrinsic plural marker in both speech and writing, and that it is most likely to appear on an adverb. An experiment designed to confirm its oft-claimed status as a distributive marker reveals that whereas adults systematically interpret it in this way, children under the age of 8 rarely do, even when appropriate contextual support is provided.