Alternation ‘Causative (morphological)’ (Coded)

This form of the causative comprises about nine different suffixes which appear mainly with intransitive and a few transitive verbs. The fact that this type of causative is built through suffixation has led to the present naming and has been applied in numerous sources such as Yeon (2003). O'Grady (1991) refers to this alternation as 'Lexical Causative', although Sohn (1999: 374) uses this term to refer to inherently causative verbs that are not morphologically derived from retraceable base forms. The productivity of this alternation seems to be quite reduced in modern Korean, as it can only be applied on a set of about 400-500 Native Korean verbs (O'Grady 1991: 154). Being lexicalised to a great extent, O'Grady (1991: 154) or Yeon (2003: 79) mention that a morphological causative verb form may have a meaning diverging from the verb's base form (see ex. 183, 120 or 155). A couple of morphological causative forms have been given here which have been found in an on-line dictionary, although they had not been known to me prior to this investigation (see ex. 245 or 278). Only transitive and intransitive verbs have morphological causative forms. As the name suggests, a more or less striking difference between this type of causative and the periphrastic causative is that the latter type is a syntactically analytic construction. The semantic differences between this type of causative and periphrastic causative constructions have been discussed in numerous publications (see e.g., O'Grady 1991: 154, 172, Sohn 1999: 376 or Yeon 2003: 83ff.). The more 'traditional' conceptualisation is that the causee in a morphological causative construction has little or no agency. Additionally, contrary to the periphrastic causative, this causative implies a direct impact on the thing or person affected by the causer (e.g., in English there is a slight difference between 'John turned the chair around' and 'John made the chair turn around'). As discussed in the comment field of the entry for jugda, the distinction between what has been labelled as 'distant' and 'contact' causation by Yeon (2003: 83ff.) is by no means that regularly mappable onto the morphological and periphrastic causatives. For example, with verbs such as kkeulhda 'boil' as in ex. 130 the referral to a distance vs. contact-based explanation is rather dissatisfying since the agent (who is typically animate) cannot make water boil in any (physically) 'direct' way. Additionally, in many cases the periphrastic causative may include the meaning of both 'contact' and 'distant' causation, and in fact for a multiplicity of Korean verbs this is the only option to build a causative construction. Moreover, what many sources rather tend to neglect is the fact that the construal of an action (and/or its result) may have an impact on the choice of a particular type of causative. It seems that whether one considers the result of an action or the action itself as more relevant to one's concerns - as vague as this intimation may sound to the reader here - can override the actual 'physical' realities of how an action has been carried out, that is, whether some result was caused directly or indirectly. See the comments on jugida 'KILL' for more. Causativised intransitive verbs have a NOM-ACC case pattern, and causativised transitive verbs have a NOM-DAT-ACC pattern. Note that ditransitive verbs do not have a morphological causaive form. Some morphological causative forms seem to be used as a compex predicate together with juda 'give', although prescriptive sources do not acknowledge this fact enough (see ex. 206 or 250).

Verb Meaning Verb form Basic coding frame Derived coding frame Occurs Comment # Ex.