Alternation ‘Passive (morphological)’ (Coded)

Similarly to morphological causatives, a verb which undergoes this alternation is suffixed with a small set of different, partly phonologically, and partly lexically determined suffixes (see Yeon 2003: 109, for example, or Lee and Ramsey 2000: 206ff.). The morphology of this type of passive formation is not productive anymore (Lee and Ramsey 2000: 207), and restricted to a few predicates of mostly native Korean origin. Other types of verbs, for example complex hada predicates simply exchange the verb hada with another verb such as tanghada 'be affected by something'. The later type of 'passive' formation has not been included in this database here (see O'Grady 1991: 48 or Yeon 2003: 108, for example). As Lee and Ramsey (2000: 208) describe, the rather high degree of lexicalisation of the morphological passive in Korean has sometimes brought along changes in a verb's meaning. These meaning changes have been mentioned in a couple of verb entries, and in the case of HEAR it has been included as a separate entry. Moreover, this lexicalisation has brought along apparent passive forms that do not have any active counterparts anymore (see Yeon 2003: 103). In a passive clause, the accusative-marked NP of a former transitive verb is marked with nominative and is granted subject status. It is less obvious what happens with the former nominative-marked NP, however. With a passive verb it either seems to be inexpressible or can be expressed with dative-marking (or locative marking on inanimate nouns) on the NP, or through the postposition euhaeseo 'by' which governs locative case, with the latter possibility sounding rather stilted in spoken usage. Lee and Ramsey (2000: 207) state that the presence of a locative or instrumental-marked NP in a clause forces the agent NP to be expressed in a postpositional phrase. According to several researchers (Yeon 2003: 109 or Lee and Ramsey 2000: 208) this alternation does not apply to ditransitive verbs, to verbs of sensation, cognition and emotion, verbs which have reciprocal meaning and as a more morphologically motivated feature, verbs whose stems end with -i. Among verbs with the coding pattern NOM-ACC, HELP for example cannot undergo mopological passive. Researchers that discuss this alternation do not mention the possibility of arguing that the morphological passive applies to verbs which the argument structure only, where the patient role implies high affectedness. Admittedly though this suggestion does not work for all of the verbs, since NAME for example has a morphological passive form although the 'patient' is not really highly affected.

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