Passive and Causative Serial Verb Constructions in Korean

초록

The purpose of this study is to investigate two patterns of morphological passive and causative serial verb constructions. I am against the approaches in which the two patterns have distinct syntactic structures. Instead, I claim that they have a univocal structure based on the order of two morpho-syntactic applications: serialization precedes morphological passivization/causativization. I claim that verbs must be identical in their category (namely, vDO or vINCH) to form serial verbs. To this successfully serialized verb construction, a higher level of functional categorizer (vPASS or vCAUS) merges to create standard passive/causative SVCs. The consequence of this sequential operation is as if each verb underwent the morphological derivation. This is because the later merged functional head c-commands the entire serialized verb construction, supporting Distributed Morphology (Marantz 1997, 2007; Son 2006). The other structure, where passive/causative morphemes occur on each verb, is a PF variant of the standard SVCs.

키워드