Development of grammatical voice marking in Korean : on the causative, middle and passive uses of suffix -i

Abstract

Voice-markers enable speakers to profile a situation/event in ways that reflect their perspective of ‘who’ or ‘what’ is being foregrounded as the discourse unfolds. Our diachronic study focuses on how a versatile voice marker evolves new functions as it competes for its semantic niche with other voice markers. Using data from Old Korean texts written in Kukyel and data from Middle and Modern Korean texts written in Hankul from the Sejong historical corpus, we show how Korean suffix -i extends from causative to middle and passive uses through reflexive causatives while competing with voice markers -eci and -key ha-. Our analysis reveals: (i) a relaxation of telicity and specificity constraints, which facilitates the extension of -i from a valence-increasing causative marker to a valence-reducing spontaneous and facilitative middle marker, and (ii) deployment of innovative morphosyntactic strategies (e.g. ‘double causatives’, ‘double passives’ and ‘hybrid passives’) to disambiguate between causative and passive uses of -i. The difference in directionality for -eci constructions (middle-to-passive development) and for -i constructions (causative-to-middle plus causative-to-passive developments) also has implications for our understanding of the development of voice systems in other languages.