A Comparative Study of Japanese Passive and Korean Passive

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to compare various approaches to the passives inJapanese and Korean and explore a way in which characteristics of the passives in the two languages can be best accounted for. The following points are clarified: 1) The passive in Japanese is highly productive, while the passive in Korean is far less productive and more restricted. There are three factors that make the passive in Korean less productive. First, Korean is more agent-dominant than Japanese is. Agent-oriented constructions have a wider scope than affected-oriented constructions in Korean. In contrast, affected-oriented constructions have a wider scope than agent-oriented constructions in Japanese. Second, the causee in the causative with an intransitive verb can take the dative in Japanese, while it is banned in Korean. This blocks the derivation of the passive with an intransitive verb. Third, the causative-passive cannot be derived systematically in Korean since most Korean verbs cannot take more than one suffix, while Japanese verbs can take two different suffixes. 2) Korean and Japanese share one important characteristic that their passives are strongly constrained by animacy. The analyses of the passive in the two languages in terms of the traditional dichotomy between the direct passive and the indirect passive cannot provide an adequate account of the constraint. The passive in Japanese and Korean are divided, at least, into two types: the passive of interest and the anticausative passive. The former depends on empathy-based affectedness, while the latter depends on objective affectednes. The passive of interest is obtained by introducing into the subject position a new participant from whose point of view the event is described. Therefore, the subject needs to be animate, and typically human.