Alternation ‘ji-Passive (periphrastic)’ (Coded)

Similarly to the morphological passive, the periphrastic ji- passive reduces the valency of a verb by one, although it seems to be applicable to a wider range of verbs, sometimes making it the only available option to build passive forms. For some inransitive verbs such as ttwida this periphastic form seems to exist as well, creating some sort of impersonal predicate with an agent implied, but not overtly expressed. This kind of phenomenon does not seem to be well-studied in Korean, however. As to the diachrony of this construction, Yeon (2003: 111) mentions that "Historically, the verb ci- came from the verb, ti-, which means 'to fall' (Bae 1988: 112 [SK: see Yeon 2003 for this reference]). It is generally accepted that the passive auxiliary verb ci- is historically same as the main verb ci- which has various meanings, but the prototypical meaning common to the various usages is a change of state (see Lee 1993: pp109-110 [SK: see Yeon 2003 for this reference])." Note that this auxiliary verb has many other functions in constructions where the valency of a verb is not altered (see Yeon 2003: 112/113 for a litle overview). Researchers such as Yeon (2003: 119ff.) have long been trying o figure out the semantic differences between the morphological passive and the periphrastic passive, and different factors seems to play into each other. The most unproblematic case for illustration might be where a verb has both the possibility to undergo morphological and periphrastic passive alternation. Ex. 158 shows the morphological passive form of nohda, where the event of being put somewhere seems to have happened spontaneously (at least seen from the speaker's perspective), and more importantly, it is assumed that the agent is unknown, and the existence of that agent is not even presupposed. As a conseuquence, and agent cannot be expressed here. Ex. 157 by contrast shows a sentence with a periphrastic passive, where it is implied that a feeling cannot be put away (translated here with an active sentence) even if one wanted to, and therefore one can conclude that the periphrastic passive tends to retain some volitionality and agency with regard to the instantiation of an event. As opposed to a sentence with a morphological passive, some unknown agent seems to be implied in a periphrastic passive construction (see cf. 94, 233), and this is how some researchers such as O'Grady (1991: 49) call such a verb a 'middle verb' (although this term has been applied to a morphological passive form), and this degree of retained agency seems to correlate with retained control of the agent over the patient. Accordingly, Yeon (2003: 120ff.) states that in Korean there are verbs which describe weather, nature or perception events (see HEAR or SEE in this database) that undergo morphological passivisation, whereas these verbs cannot be inflected for a periphrastic passive, which Yeon takes as evidence to say that periphrastic passives can only be applied when some control over the patient can be maintained. As you can see, many examples for this type of passive have been translated into English with an active, modal counterpart, and this is maybe how I tried to express the volitionality that is implied in most of the periphrastic passive sentences. Interestingly, other Koreanic languages such as Jeju for example have developed constructions similar to this periphrastic passive in Korean where the auxiliary ji is used to express deontic modality: al-a ji-keu-nya know-CONV AUX-IRR-Q means 'You think you can understand this?' in Jeju (see Kang 2007 for a little overview). Unfortunately, literature on Korean tends to generalise too much on the differences between the morphological and periphrastic passive, and it could well be that in spoken language both versions are used interchangeably, with the periphrasticpassive slowly supplanting morphological forms. As an example, ex. 247 shows the periphrastic passive form of jjijda 'TEAR', and it is little convincing here to argue for volitionality and agency in terms of the event of shoes getting torn. Still, this might be due to the fact that arguably, when a verb can employ only one passive variant, then it is probable that one and the same construction can exhibit the semantic differences from above depending on the context (see ex. 218 where the periphrastic passive does not imply an agent). In fact, for the verb TEAR I was not really aware of the fact that there was a morphological passive form of TEAR, and this might have fostered my usage of a periphrastic passive form which includes that for agentless passives. Therefore, frequency in usage should be considered when looking at the differences between these two variants, and a corpus-based approach is still pending. As another argument that should be seen as a warning from being too over-generalising is the fact that for some verbs such as deopda 'COVER' it is indeed quite difficult to argue for a semantic difference between the two morphosyntactically different types of passive. Yeon (2003: 123) suggests that the expressibility of an overt agent phrase in a sentence depends on the verbal semantics of a passive verb. Agents in some passive sentences in Korean can either be marked with dative (animate nouns), locative (inanimate nouns) or a postpositional phrase (see entry for morphological passive for more). He distinguishes between resultative and processive passives, where the former depicts a situation where the result of an action is salient (allowing for no agent or only a 'natural force', inanimate agen), whereas the latter a situation where the process (albeit being a vague notion, see ex. 152) of an event is salient.

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