| This dissertation concerns the syntactic variation between English passives and their Korean counterparts. Descriptive and pedagogical treatments of Korean usually make an analogy between English passive sentences and Korean sentences involving the causative/passive suffixes -i/hi/li/ki- , but this commonly assumed correspondence between English and Korean passives results from overlooking the fact that there are structurally different types of passives in Korean. I argue that the right classification of Korean passives is a prerequisite for identifying the differences between the types of Korean passives, and show how they are syntactically different. My analyses of Korean passives will reveal notable similarities as well as differences between English and Korean passives, which were not fully understood in previous analyses.; This dissertation discusses three main issues. In Chapter 2, I analyze English passives from the perspective of the Minimalist Program. I show how the passive morpheme -EN functions in the process of passivization, and eliminate the so-called theta-role transfer system by arguing that the by-phrase in fact merges in the canonical external argument position. In Chapter 3, I examine passive-like constructions such adjectival passives, statives, and middles, and argue that the general properties of these constructions are characterized by lexical rules that manipulate the argument structure of base verbs and require that the so-called logical object merges in the external argument position. I point out that this poses a serious challenge for the strict version of the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH). In Chapter 4, I classify the types of Korean passives on the basis of their argument structure and examine their syntactic differences. One of the crucial issues in this chapter is to what degree my analysis of English passives in Chapter 2 carries over to Korean passives. I show that what is known as the CI passive in Korean is similar to the English verbal passive in its syntactic behavior. The HI passive with the causative/passive suffixes -i-/-hi-/-li-/-ki- , on the other hand, behaves in parallel to the non-movement constructions such as adjectival passives and middles investigated in Chapter 3. |
