초록 열기/닫기 버튼
The goal of this paper is to examine whether the traditional view that passives in the Korean language, compared with those in English, are relatively poor in their distribution. We start with the suspicion that the existing views have been based on some approaches to passive constructions in English and Korean that elicited their conclusions from the comparative analyses of not so extensive cases. We point out that there are reasons to believe that the diversity and the distribution of passives in Korean are not as poor as has been widely believed. Through the analysis of an English text and its Korean translations, we find out that Korean passive constructions easily outnumber English counterparts. We attribute the result to the fact that Korean passives operate not only on the traditional concept of topicality but also on some comprehensive notions like intentionality and context dependency.
