Earticle

This paper discusses the acceptability of inanimate subjects in the transitive clauses describing causative events. Inanimate subjects are not allowed in Korean while they are in English. It argues that this typological difference reflects two contrasting viewpoints on instigating causative events. Korean focuses on the participant's inherent properties such as animacy while English focuses on the participant's actual role such as agentivity in a given situation. In Korean, inanimate entities are not allowed in the subject position regardless of their actual role in a given situation because they are not considered to have the inherent properties, viz. mental and physical capacities, to instigate causative events. In English, however, inanimate subjects are permitted in a situation in which inanimate entities play an agentive role like humans despite their lack of the inherent properties to instigate causative events. This paper also shows that the contrasting viewpoints are reflected in the typological differences between Korean and English in instrumental/associative and goal/recipient case marking system

In this paper, we clarified the Semantic, Syntactic, and Morphological features of Japanese Spontaneous Sentences. First of all, in Spontaneous Sentences, the Subject includes both the roles of the Agent and the Patient, and describes the spontaneous change of state inherent in the Subject, so the involvement of the External Agent is completely excluded. As a result, it allows co-occurrence with adverbs that modify spontaneous state changes, undergoes Causative manipulation, and passes the Implication test. Secondly, The subject of a Spontaneous Sentence does not appear as a result of the deletion of the external agent in the Transitive verb structure, but is the subject that exists in that position from the beginning. Although Spontaneous and Intransitive sentences have the same structure(case structure) on the surface, in the deep structure, the arrangement of cases and the syntactic operations based on these work independently, so Spontaneous Sentences have an Autonomous Syntactic system that is different from Intransitive Sentences. Finally, Although Spontaneous and Intransitive verbs have superficially the same form, they have different Grammatical Autonomy, so homophonous different gramammatical forms can be applied to both.

The purpose of this article is to consturct the problematics of the semiotics of Covid-19. There are three main dimensions of this inquiry which are agentivity, narrativity, temporality. In the first section, the author attempted to apprehend 6 semiotic features of the pandemic which are ethical, political, axiological, ontological, epistemological, methodological. In the second section, some semiotic isotopies of the narrative discursivity of the Covid-19 are suggested. In terms of the temporality, the non-linearity is underlined. In conclusion, this work insisted on the necessity of constructing the concept of deep narrativity and the infinite responsibility of the human beings.

It is generally observed that transitive constructions with inanimate subjects are not usually preferred either in English or Korean. However, Korean exhibits a much stronger nonpreference for those constructions than English. To account for this difference between English and Korean, Kim et al.(2009) resort to ‘animacy,’ whereas Jang(2009) employs ‘agentivity.’ However, since these concepts, ‘animacy’ and ‘agentivity,’ serve as primary factors in determining the subject of a transitive construction both in English and Korean, neither Kim et al.’s or Jang’s analysis effectively explains the strong tendency of avoiding inanimate subjects in Korean transitive constructions. In this context, we analyze both literary and nonliterary English-Korean translation data and discuss the strategies to avoid inanimate subjects in transitive sentences observed in the data. We attempt to account for this avoidance in terms of the difference in the ‘subject hierarchies’ of English and Korean. (Ewha Womans University)

The purpose of this study is to discuss Korean translations of English passives and to provide functional explanations for each type of them. We analyze 160 passives from Rowling's (1998) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Meyer's (2007) Twilight and their Korean versions. The English passives are shown to be translated into Korean passives (19.4%), actives (68.7%) and paraphrastical expressions (11.9%). Korean actives are classified into 5 subtypes: intransitives (49.1%), transitives (40.0%), adjectives (5.5%), nouns (4.5%), and adverbs (0.9%). This study accounts for the subtypes in terms of functional concepts such as topicality, agentitivity, animacy, stativity, and lexicalization.

The purpose of this study is to discuss how animacy affects English-Korean translations. 52 inanimate subject sentences and 52 animate subject sentences are selected from Reader’s Digest (English-Korean Version) Vol. 80-85. Our analysis shows the followings: i) 96.2% of the English animate subjects are kept as subject in their Korean translations, while only 55.8% of inanimate subjects are translated as subject. ii) Inanimate subjects such as nature (e.g. cloud), machine (e.g. helicopter), social organization (e.g. college) remains as subject in Korean translations. iii) Human participants occurring in syntactic slots other than subject are chosen as new subjects in Korean translations, while inanimate subjects are demoted to adverbial or prenominal phrase. iv) Less prototypical transitive clauses tend to be translated as transitive clauses with the same inanimate subjects, while more prototypical transitive clauses tend to be translated as intransitive clauses with new subjects.

의미론적으로 타동사를 일반동사를 취하는 사역구문에는 세 개의 참여자가 존재하게 된다. 이 때 제2행위자는 동작연쇄의 머리인 제1행위자와 꼬리인 피영향자 사이에 존재하여 머리인 제1행위자로부터 입력된 힘은 도구역인 제2행위자를 거쳐 꼬리인 피영향자에 도달하게 된다. 그러나 제1행위자로부터 전달된 에너지는 사역동사에 따라 제2행위자의 행위자성에 다른 형태의 영향을 주며 변화한 제2행위자성의 정도는 사실성의 정도를 결정하게 한다. 행위자성은 자발적 의지와 통제력을 이용하여 그 정도를 나타내었으며 사역동사에 따라 다양한 값을 가진다는 것을 보였다. 또한 변화한 행위자성의 정도로 사실성의 정도를 알 수 있다.4장에서 조사한 사역동사에 대한 제2행위자의 변화한 행위자성과 일반동사V2의 사실성을 이용하여 (표2)를 얻을 수 있다. 가로는 변화한 제2행위자의 행위자성을, 세로는 일반동사 V2의 실현인 사실성의 정도를 표현하여 각각의 사역동사가 가지는 두 값을 상관 관계표로 나타내었다. (표2)를 통해 사역동사들이 뚜렷하게 두 그룹으로 구분되는 것을 알 수 있다. 첫 번째 그룹은 i에 해당하는 사역동사들이며 두 번째 그룹은 ii부터 viii까지의 사역동사들이다. 첫 번째 그룹은 행위자성과 사실성 사이에 아무런 상관 관계가 없는 것으로 제2행위자의 행위자성이 매우 작음에도 불구하고 사실성에서 큰 값을 보이는 것은 변화한 제2행위자의 행위자성이 사실성의 결정에 영향을 주지 않는다는 것을 의미한다. 즉 제2행위자성과 무관하다는 것은 제1행위자의 의도가 그대로 사실성에 투사되어 나타난다는 것을 말한다.

This thesis is to show that the causative verb in English determines the degree of the secondary agent’s agentivity, and also the degree of the factuality of the second agent’s action. The causative construction in English has the primary agent as the head of an action and the secondary agent as the instrument. The secondary agent is both an agent and a patient. It is an agent in the sense that it is affected by the primary agent. If an agent is to perform an action, it needs two factors, volition and control. They vary according to the type of agents, the context, and the construction, thereby creating different degrees of agentivity. The degree of factuality, ie., whether or not the secondary agent actually does the action, is determined by the lexical meaning of the causative verb and the agentivity of the secondary agent. The secondary agent’s agentivity is determined by the type of the causative verb. Accordingly, the causative verb is the crucial factor in determining agentivity and factuality. To conclude, there are two groups of causative verbs. The first group has the highest degree of factuality regardless of the instrument’s agentivity. The primary agent’s intention is projected on the factuality. In the other group, the instrument’s agentivity is projected on the factuality. Here, agentivity is roughly proportional to factuality

In this paper, I examine the lexical choice of predicates appearing in Korean MSCs (Multiple Subject Constructions) in terms of aspect and agentivity. It has been generally assumed that only the stative predicates can appear in MSCs. Starting from the initial hypothesis that the acceptability of a MSC is subject to the aspect of its predicate, I show that it is not the aspect but the agentivity of the predicate that determines the acceptability of a MSC. To be more specific, I show that the more agentive the subject of the predicate in a MSC is, the more unacceptable the MSC is, and based on it, I propose the non-agentivity condition for MSCs. I also discuss why this kind of non-agentivity condition should hold for MSCs. My claim is that it can be derived from the deeper principles of grammar governing argument realization if we assume the split subjecthood hypothesis (Dixon 1994, etc.). Lastly, I examine the relationship between the non-agentivity condition and other semantic or pragmatic conditions proposed for MSCs such as the characterization condition (Jang 1998) and the newsworthiness condition (J. Yoon 2004).

The concept of ‘anti-agentivity’ has frequently been discussed as one of the key features of Russian language and culture. In contrast to western culture, usually characterized as a culture of logic and rationalism, Slavic culture has been described as irrational, receptive, contemplative, and acquiescing to fate. This conception has been actively explored in such fields as literature and history, but has also been developed as a concrete theme in Russian linguistics. This paper examines the structural base of Russian ‘anti-agentivity’ from a generative perspective and considers whether this generally accepted idea about the correlation between Russian language and culture/mind can be justified in syntactic terms. In particular, I show that the HAVE/BE syntactic parameter and related syntactic structures such as applicatives result in dative-infinitive, dative-lexical modal, and dative-reflexive constructions, which, Wierzbicka(1992) suggests, reveal the anti-agentive character of Russian language. The HAVE/BE parameter synchronically appears as a result of the presence/lack of a Case feature in the prepositional complementizer in the possessive structure. Historically, different phases of grammaticalization of an applicative-licensing preposition gave rise to this parameter. I show that the dative-infinitive construction arose as an extension of the HAVE/BE parameter and that the dative-lexical modal and dative-reflexive constructions derived from an ongoing grammaticalization process that resulted in the HAVE/BE parameter. Given that all these constructions are the consequence of a feature setting in a functional constituent, I argue that the so-called anti-agentivity based on the use of these constructions is not a specifically Russian phenomenon but is a universal syntactic phenomenon without a functional motivation.

The purpose of this paper is to compare passive constructions and semantic minimal pairs of verbs by showing how the semantic parameter of agentivity contributes to the use of the two kinds of English and Korean passives and that of the verbs among the semantic minimal pairs. It is shown that the agentivity nicely accounts for the use of lexical vs. phrasal passives in Korean and be-passive vs. get-passive in English. It is also claimed that in terms of agentivity there is a parallelism between lexical passives in Korean and get-passives in English, and also between phrasal passives in Korean and be-passives in English. It is argued that the use of verbs among the semantic minimal pairs is partly affected by the inherent agentivity of the verbs. The agentivity hierarchies of two Korean verbs ‘gyendi-da’ and ‘cham-da’ and the corresponding English verbs ‘bear’, ‘endure’, ‘stand’ are postulated for both English and Korean. It is claimed that despite the synonymy of the verbs the parameter of agentivity plays very important role in explaining the complementary use of the verbs among the minimal pairs, which is chiefly based on the agentivity hierarchies.

English inner aspect is divided into accomplishments, achievements, activities, and states(Vendler 1967). Pustejovsky(1991) proposes to integrate accomplishments and achievements into transition, arguing the difference between the two verb types is agentivity. However, it is inappropriate to apply his argument to general accomplishments and achievements in that the verb cited as an example in his proposal is an English ergative verb which is used as both a intransitive verb and a transitive verb. In addition, since the proposal is mainly focused on a semantic event structure, it is difficult to represent inner aspect from a minimalist point of view. Also, Pustejovsky(1991)’s proposal does not correspond the inner aspect interpretation domain suggested by MacDonald(2008). The purpose of this paper is to explain the inner aspect of English ergative verbs with a Probe-Goal feature checking mechanism proposed in Chomsky(1998) from a minimalist point of view.

This paper aims to analyse the meanings of English progressives and their relationship with agentivity within the framework of cognitive grammar. English verbs have various meanings in terms of the process they represent. Though there are many ways to classify verbs according to their meanings, I classify verb processes into perfective process and imperfective process. Perfective process is bounded in the temporal domain and has change of state, imperfective process is not bounded and extends indefinitely. But these two processes have different aspects in the progressive. Perfective process is unbounded and means permanent state like imperfectives. On the contrary, imperfective process is bounded like perfectives. These are the important characteristics represented in the English progressive. English progressive in terms of these two processes is related to agentivity. Agentivity in the extended perfective process is very weak because the subject has very weak or no volition. On the other hand, agentivity in the intended imperfective process is strong because the subject has strong volition to do something. I show the figures that are profiled in each domain according to the framework of cognitive grammar. In short, English progressive seems to be dynamic in that it can be extended or intended in the spatial, temporal, or abstract domain and the strength of agentivity it presents can be changed.

The purpose of this article is to critically review Kim, Kim & Jung (2009) and propose an alternative account for the selection of the subject of a sentence in translating English into Korean. Although being sympathetic with their proposal about the animacy effects in translating English into Korean, we are strongly suspicious of the status of animacy and the role that they claim it plays. Instead, we argue that it is not exactly the animacy that the subject of the sentence in Korean translation is affected. It has, instead, been shown that various extra factors such as agentivity, argument structure, and argument hierarchy are in operation in selecting the subject of a sentence in English-to-Korean translation. We apply the notion of agentivity to each problematic sentences discussed in Kim, Kim & Jung (2009) and finely accounted for the subject selection.