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Transitivity alternation and neutral-verbs in Korean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2001

JAEHOON YEON
JAEHOON YEON
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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Abstract

Although the way in which the transitivity alternation is realized differs from language to language, it is common cross-linguistically that a pair of morphologically related verbs participate in the alternation. Korean, an agglutinative language, employs derivational suffixes to indicate alternations in transitivity. On the other hand, there are some verbs used either transitively or intransitively with no addition of suffixes or any alternation of the root verbs, but with the object of the transitive verb the same as the subject of the intransitive. We have named this kind of verb the ‘neutral-verb’ and established some morphosyntactic and semantic criteria for neutral-verbs to distinguish the various pseudo-neutral-verb constructions from true neutral-verb constructions. We have observed the semantic differences between the analytic passives and the intransitive form of neutral-verbs on the one hand, and between the analytic causatives and the transitive form of neutral-verbs on the other.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , October 2001 , pp. 381 - 391
Copyright
© School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2001

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