earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to provide a functional account of the English translations of Korean ‘cita’ constructions. Previous studies have shown that ‘cita’ constructions have four different functions: passive, inchoative, nonautonomous, and non-volitional. The analysis of our Korean-English parallel corpus shows that ‘cita’ constructions are translated into five different types of English constructions: passives, transitive clauses, intransitive clauses, copular verb construction, and modality verb construction. It is argued that English does not have a grammatical device to systematically encode semantic domains such as non-volitional, empathy defocusing and controllability defocusing in such a way that Korean ‘cita’ construction does, and that the five construction types of English translations are functionally motivated by discourse-pragmatic factors such as topicality of participants and discourse markers as well as by semantic factors such as subtle differences in meaning reflected in the change of state.