Morphosyntax of Periphrastic Causation in Korean

Abstract

This paper proposes a morphosyntax model of encoding causation periphrastically. Periphrastic causation evolves around two functional heads cause and causee. The former head introduces a causer, and the latter head renders its complement as a caused event. Having taken care of their morphosyntactic requirements, each ultimately constitutes the essential components of the causative semantics (e1 → e2). This proposal also extends the coverage of the so-called “periphrastic causatives” to include the -key toy construction that has been analyzed independent of the -key ha construction. These two constructions share the morphosyntactic structure underlying the periphrastic causation. The surface differences between them such as different orderings and case particles stem from the general morphosyntactic requirements imposed on any sentence, coupled with the agentivity difference between two types of periphrastic causatives. In particular, the -key toy construction is unaccusative, giving rise to nom typical of this type of sentence. Recognizing two functional heads Cause and Causee, this proposal morphosyntactically explicates periphrastic causation and unifies the two constructions that have been treated separately in the literature.