Acceso usuarios
Mikyung Ahn, Foong Ha Yap
This paper examines the relationship between middle and passive voice constructions in Korean, in particular how they have come to share the same grammatical marker -eci. Based on diachronic data from the UNICONC (Korean historical) database, spanning Old, Middle and Modern Korean (15th to 20th century), our analysis reveals that -eci was initially used as a middle voice marker for spontaneous and inchoative events, with change-of-state as their common feature, then extended to transitive contexts, giving rise to passive voice usage. More recently, -eci has developed into a marker of facilitative middle constructions as well. These semantic extensions involve shifts in aspectual focus from change-of-state to resultative-state, and further to potential aspect and mood. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the diachrony of voice markers beyond the causative-to-passive pathway commonly seen in Northeast Asia to include the middle-to-passive pathway, with typological implications.
