A Passive Analysis of Morphological Causatives in Korean

Morphological causatives in Korean show some intimate correlations with morphological passives across different domains of the grammar. Morphologically, both the causative and the passive can be marked with the allomorphs -i, -hi, -li, -ki; syntactically, in both constructions, the agent of the stem verb can be assigned dative case -eykey; and semantically, some apparent causative constructions (often called the retained object construction) may be interpreted passively. In this paper, I suggest that the causative-passive correlations arise because the causative may contain the passive as part of its structure. Specifically, I argue that (i) the passive in Korean involves passive Voice; and that (ii) the head responsible for causativization, Caus(e), c-selects VoiceP in Korean including passive VoiceP. The possibility of Caus taking passive VoiceP as its complement is claimed to bring about the correlations in question.