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Yi, Eunkyung. 2016. What Modulates the Resultative Alternation? A Corpus-based Study. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 41-4, 661-677. This article is concerned with speakers’ syntactic choice between the Verb-Object-Result (VOR) and the Verb-Result-Object (VRO) construction (e.g., push the door open and push open the door). This syntactic contrast is referred to as the resultative alternation. The main goal of this article is to investigate whether the resultative alternation is modulated by (at least some of) the putative factors that are known to influence postverbal argument alternations. I examined some of the effects, namely, pronominality, definiteness, type of modification, semantic abstractness and word length of object NPs, on the syntactic choice between VOR and VRO in naturally occurring resultative sentences found in the British National Corpus. The frequency of occurrences revealed that VOR is the more frequent and canonical construction, as has been assumed in the literature, while VRO is in general less common but highly frequent when occurring with some particular verbs and particular result phrases. The results also showed that definiteness, post-modified structure and extended length of object NPs tend to increase the likelihood of occurring in the VRO construction, although it is in general the less frequent or less favored than the VOR construction. This study demonstrates that the resultative alternation does not arbitrarily occur but is constrained by semantic and syntactic properties of the postverbal NPs. (Seoul National University)