naemsaereul matta (냄새를 맡다)

Complex verb

Verb meaning: SMELL [smell]

Comment: This is a complex predicate that consists of naemsae 'a smell' and matda, a verb whose meaning is not clear to me (there surely is a homonym matda which means 'take on the responsibility for something', but I do not know why these two verbs should be related). Impressionistically, naemsae seems to occur in a prosodic unit with the verb matda nothing else seems to come between this noun-like element and the verb in this case, although sentence ex. 73 shows that elements can break up this prosodic unit suggesting that syntactically the noun and the verb are fairly independent from each other. Ex. 72 shows that naemsae can appear with accusative case marking, altough like in many other noun-verb complex predicates it does not seem to be a 'true' object in that syntactic operations such as passivisation do not apply, and the whole predicate may take another accusative-marked argument. In that case, it sounds odd to have two overtly accusative-marked NPs within the same clause.

Examples: see at the bottom

Basic coding frame

Schema: 1-nom 2-acc V

# Microrole Coding set Argument type
1 smeller NP-nom A
2 smelled entity NP-acc P
Examples for basic coding frame:
(72)

호랑이가 지나가는 사람의 냄새를 맡았다.
Horangiga jinaganeun sarame naemsaereul matatta.
horangi-ga
tiger-NOM
jinaga-neun
pass_by-ATTR
saram-ui
person-GEN
naemsae-reul
smell-ACC
mat-ass-da
smell-PST-DECL
The tiger smelled persons passing by.

Alternations

Alternation Derived coding frame Occurs Comment # Ex.

Examples

(73)

너 잠깐 이거 냄새 좀 맡아 봐!
Neo jamkkan igeo naemsae (jom) mata bwa!
neo
you
jamkkan
just_a_moment
igeo
this_thing
naemsae
smell
jom
a_bit
mat-a
smell-CONV
bo-a
see-PLAIN
Just check out this smell for a minute!

Comment: As you can see in this example from colloquial Korean, case markers are not used in this context and therefore not obligatory in spoken usage. The intervening particle jom shows that the word for smell, naemsae can be separated from the verb matda.