Inalienable possession construction and passive markers inducing an idiomatic interpretation

Lee, Soo-Hwan and Doo-Won Lee. 2017. Inalienable possession construction and passive markers inducing an idiomatic interpretation. Linguistic Research 34(3), 239-272. When a genitive marker, instead of an accusative or a nominative marker, is realized with the first nominal in a multiple case marking (MCM) construction that is relevant to the inalienable possessive structures in Korean, the given sentence may receive an idiomatic interpretation. The nominative possessum within MCM constructions may participate in either preserving or triggering idiomatic interpretations, whereas the accusative possessum may only participate in preserving idiomatic meanings and not in triggering them. With consideration to MCM constructions and passivization which enable idiomatic interpretations to be preserved or triggered compositionally in syntax, we argue that the passive verbal ending (a/e) ci qualifies as the strongest passive marker whereas the overt passive morpheme i/hi/li/ki is the next strongest, and the null passive morpheme ∅PASS the weakest. Hence, we propose that at least within idiomatic domains the null passive morpheme should be regarded as a quasi-passive morpheme which is remarkably different from the overt passive morpheme i/hi/li/ki or the passive verbal ending (a/e) ci. (Sogang University · Korea National University of Transportation)