Alternation ‘hada-alternation’ (Coded)

This alternation seems to apply only to verbs of emotion and verbs of tactile sensation, which have in common a NOM-NOM case pattern that has often been claimed to alternate with a DAT-NOM case pattern, a pattern that I cannot accept as entirely acceptable, at least in informal, every-day usage of Korean. The emotion/sensation verb in its converbal form can be combined with hada to a complex predicate (see comment in ex. 308 which curiously changes the case pattern of the whole complex to NOM-ACC. Several sources (see Yeon 2003:66ff. and Sohn 1999: 382) have mentioned contraints in Korean where as a part of a speaker's socio-cultural, meta-linguistic knowledge, a speaker is considered to be unable to "have direct access to a third person's subjective internal feelings" (Yeon 2003: 66) which is why emotion (and tactile (?) sensation) verbs such as the ones given here can usually only be used with first person (see Evans 2010: 74 for a similar account) or questions addressed to second person when used on ther own and not in reportative constructions. As Yeon (2003: 65) shows, a Korean verb of emotion or sensation cannot be used in imperatives or volitional future in its base form, whereas with verbs that have undergone this alternation it becomes possible (see ex. 309, for example). Especially the latter evidence suggests that this type of alternation results in the higher volitionality of the experiencer as observed frequently in distinctions between verbs such as the English SEE and LOOK. As a consequence, Yeon concludes that the hada-transitivisation process brings about an 'externalisation' (Yeon 2003: 66) of such emotions, although this kind of explanation unfortunately ends up sounding quite vague, and a joint psycholinguistic, morphosyntactic analysis is required to elucidate this aspect. Whether the accusative-marked argument can be regarded the grammatical 'object' of a hada-alternated verb is not clear, although as a tentative observation, passivisation cannot be applied on this construction.

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