earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to provide a functional account of the English translations of so-called Korean ‘toyta’ passives. Previous studies have shown that ‘toyta’ passives have three different functions: passive, external cause, and non-volitional. Our analysis of the Korean-English parallel corpus shows that ‘toyta’ passives are translated into passives (48.4%) and intransitive/transitive actives (51.6%). It is argued that English does not have a grammatical device to systematically encode ‘semantic defocusing’ such as ‘volitionality defocusing’ and ‘external cause defocusing’ in such a way that Korean ‘toyta’ passives do, and that the two construction types of English translations are functionally motivated by discourse-pragmatic factors such as topicality of participants and discourse markers. This study also shows how human agents are focused in the English translations in terms of Ikegami's (1991) typology.