Abstract
AbstractPrevious studies using diachronic data from theSejongHistorical Corpus have traced the semantic extension of voice marker -ecifrom middle to passive uses (e.g.Ahn & Yap 2017). In this study, based on data from theSejongContemporary Spoken Corpus, we further examine the relationship between middle and passive uses of -eciconstructions, with special attention to the neutralization of adversative readings that give rise to generalized (in addition to adversative) middle and passive -eciconstructions. Our analysis reveals that judgments about adversative readings in Contemporary Korean are not emergent solely from the semantics of the verb or adjective preceding -ecibut additionally are emergent and grounded in the interaction between discourse participants. The distributional characteristics of -ecialso show a strong interaction between voice and tense-aspect-mood (TAM). There is also some interaction effects from register and text type/genre, particularly in the usage frequency distribution of spontaneous and passive -eciconstructions. In addition, contrary to the traditional notion that -eciis essentially a passive marker, in real usage, -eciis still far more frequently used as a middle marker than a passive marker.
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