Animacy, Agency and Causality in Korean Voice and Diathesis

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Animacy, Agency and Causality in Korean Voice and Diathesis Animacy, agency and causality in Korean voice and diathesis A cognitive-semiotic usage-based perspective Stefan Lorenz Knoob Submitted for the degree of PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London ProQuest Number: 10731453 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10731453 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Abstract Adopting a usage-based construction grammar approach, the thesis proposes a radically revised account of the Korean voice system with two main oppositions: ACTIVE ~ INACTIVE and ENDOACTIVE ~ EXOACTIVE. These are marked on the verb, but voice categories are primarily semantic and equally basic. The attendant clause structures are only weakly determined by the predicate’s voice status and instead inherited from a systemically independent diathesis system. The thesis first demonstrates the inherent Indoeuropean biases and asymmetries in the Standard Voice Model that underlies the traditional active-passive-causative account. It then turns to the Korean system and its central features: inchoative-passive conflation in a single INACTIVE voice, voice-marking paradigm proliferation with equipollency and complex correspondences to voice categories, causative and passive usage of unmarked basic verbs, and aniinacy, agency and causality differentiation in the diathesis system. The thesis then details animacy-related effects in the oblique argument system. The choice of Inanimate and Animate Locational patterns is conditioned not by ontological animacy but by utterance-specific situational animacy and agency. And the variety of Korean agent-phrase-like patterns reflects differentiations along the situational animacy, agency and causality dimensions that correlate with animacy and agency constraints on diathesis selection. Finally, the thesis investigates the lexical spread and usage of ‘morphological’ and ‘analytic passive’ verbs. It shows that inchoative usage and inchoative-passive ambivalences are so widespread that they must be considered a central feature of a single INACTIVE category. And animacy and agency differentiation drives a systemic alignment of non-interpersonal actions, weakly agentive situations and inanimate causation with spontaneous situations. In conclusion, the thesis proposes that inchoative-passive conflation may be due to the fact that the ANIMATE ~ INANIMATE and AGENTIVE ~ NON-AGENTIVE dichotomies push the organisation and frequency distribution in the Korean diathesis system towards alignment of non-agentive causation with spontaneous situation-dynamics. 3 Acknowledgements This thesis has taken a long time, even considering the fact that its author hails from a country where the peculiar' life-form of the ‘eternal student5 has long been considered a regular fixture of the academic world. Even in this context, I would be more guilty than most, and first mention should go to those who have been in the fall-out zone: my mother, my aunt, many of those who taught me over the years, my wife and my son. As for supporting this thesis, my greatest debt and deepest gratitude go to my supervisor, Dr Jaehoon Yeon, who has shown remarkable patience and generosity while I slowly committed my thoughts to paper, went through several false starts and reorganisations, changed my mind more than once, and then found it hard to put an end to what had finally taken off and gathered momentum. Thank you, for putting up all those years with a difficult and headstrong student, for giving me those final kicks in the backside, and most of all for your help in sorting out ways to support myself and the family over the years. And in this place, I would like to express my appreciation for the generous support of Korean funding bodies: the Korea Foundation who supported my PhD studies for the first three years during which I should have really finished the bulk of my research and to the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) for my current Research Fellowship that allowed me to stay out of more mundane employment during the final months of my thesis. Intellectual debts are, I hope, sufficiently acknowledged in the thesis itself and it remains to finally acknowledge those of a more private nature. Here my deepest appreciation goes to my father, to my mother and to my aunt. Although it is impossible to say what would have happened without them, it is largely they who have opened my eyes to the world, shown me the pure joy of looking, wondering and thinking and taught me how to grow and cultivate the mind. And to mum and auntie, thank you for always being there and for helping out when help was needed. And to mum, for staying with us after the births of our children, particularly our twins. Final thanks, and only because she is the last person to come into my life, thank you to my wife, Gi Weol Cho, who has stood by me during the past 5 years and has done an unbelievable job in cheerfully nurturing three new-born children during my long and late absences over the past three years. 4 Contents 1 Preliminaries 8 1.0 Introduction: Korean and its place in International Linguistics 8 1.1 Topic, scope and organisation of this thesis 11 1.2 Theoretical background and assumptions 19 1.2.1 On framework(s) and theoretical assumptions 19 1.2.2 Basic tenets o f the Dynamic Construction Grammar approach in this thesis 25 [1] Constructions are the primitive building blocks of syntax 26 [2 ] Constructions exist at all levels of morpho-syntactic hierarchy and lexical specificity 27 [3] Constructions are organised into interconnected taxonomic hierarchies 28 [4] Utterance structures are derived from multiple constructions 29 [5] Language and grammar are full offractally structured non-discrete continua 30 1.3 Data: Choice, methodology and glossing 31 1.3.1 General considerations and imperatives 31 1.3.2 The Koreanist methodological tradition and its problems 33 1.3.3 The data-gathering methodology in this thesis 35 1.3.4 Data presentation and glossing 36 [1] Avoiding haphazard and distortive labelling 36 [2 ] Avoiding distortive effects of decompositional glossing 38 [3] Translation equivalence and context-specifwity 40 1.3.5 Romanisation 40 2 Voice and diathesis: Analytic categories, their application to Korean and some major problems 44 2.1 The Voice Continuum and its categorial segmentation in Linguistic Theory 44 2.1.1 The concepts of voice and diathesis in linguistic theory 44 2.1.2 Indoeuropean biases in the Standard Voice Model 46 2.1.3 Voice and diathesis categories and their asymmetric segmentation o f the Voice Continuum 50 2.2 Voice in Korean: The consensus, its origins and its core database 55 2.2.1 Historical origins 55 2.2.2 The example canon: Synthetic paradigms and interpersonal constructions 58 2.3 Problems for the active-passive-causative system analysis 64 2.3.1 Verb-structural pattern proliferation 65 [1] Pattern proliferation and verb class variety: The Primary and Phonosemantic classes 67 [2 ] Pattern proliferation and verb class variety: The Periphrastic and Phrasal classes 69 [3] The Analytic Inchoative and Causative constructions 74 [4] Pattern variety and pattern competition 77 [5] Paradigm proliferation, equipollency and solitaires 81 [6] Pattern proliferation and its treatment in the literature 84 [7] Coda 87 2.3.2 Animacy and agency effects in diathesis constructions and their use 88 [1] Animacy-related differentiation o f INVERSE CA USE LOCUS patterns 89 [2 ] Relative Animacy Effects in diathesis selection 91 5 [3] Absolute Animacy and Agency Effects in TRANSACTIVE diathesis selection 95 [4] Animacy and agency constraints in the Koreanist literature 97 2.3.3 The passive-like usage of Basic INACTIVE verbs 100 3 Animacy, agency and causality in oblique argument patterns and the Korean ‘agent phrase’ 106 3.0 Introduction 106 3.1 Animacy and agency in oblique particle patterns 107 3.1.1 The Korean oblique particle system 107 [1] Basic Oblique particles 107 [2 ] Animate Locational particles 108 3.1.2 The Korean spatial reference system: characteristics and constraints 109 [1] LOCATIONAL patterns, spatial relations and figure-ground contiguity 109 [2 ] Positions and path points versus situational setting 118 [3] Path points: source, goal and destination 120 [4] Locational anchoring and positional states 124 [5] Multiple LOCATIONAL arguments and the Single Anchor Constraint 127 3.1.3 Animacy as a situational parameter in LOCATIONAL pattern choice 130 [1 ] ANIMATE and BASIC LOCATIONAL patterns in the locative spectrum 132 [2 ] Asymmetries between BASIC and ANIMATE LOCATIONAL patterns 134 [3] LOCATIONAL patterns and the 'goal-recipient' continuum 136 [4] Situational factors in LOCATIONAL pattern choice: 'Intermediate’ and pseudo- animacy 139 [5] Ontological versus situational animacy: Unexpected pattern choice 142 [6] Animate entities in spatial reference: alternative solutions 146 [7] Cognitive-perceptual constraints on ANIMATE LOCATIONAL patterns 148 [8] Situational animacy as a general requirement on ANIMATE LOCATIVE pattern choice 150
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