Vortrag: Some verbs are lighter than others

A comparison of Korean ha- ‘do’, sikhi- ‘order’ and mantul- ‘make, produce’

There are three verbs in Korean that can serve as head to its causative construction, namely ha- ‘do’, sikhi- ‘order’ and mantul- ‘make/produce’. While ha- is the most frequent among them, their meanings all diminish in this construction in favour of a causative expression, e.g., mantul- ‘make/produce’ is used where English would use ‘make’ in the parallel construction ‘make sb. (do/...)’, but without maintaining its literal meaning of ‘producing’. This suggests that these verbs have (at least some) light verb characteristics. In order to determine their supposed lightness, I set a prototype definition for the Korean light verb and corresponding light verb construction along which the three were evaluated. I argue, based on their behaviours in causative contexts (i.e. the periphrastic construction) and non-causative contexts (i.e. light verb constructions and semantically heavy, transitive uses), that these verbs place on three different points of a lightness scale, such that ha- appears as the prototypically lightest and mantul- as the heaviest of the three.

What does and what does not count as a light verb construction (LVC) is highly dependent on individual languages, and even more so on authors. I investigated the most prevalent type of Korean LVC that exists, which is one of the main ways to predicate in Korean next to using a full verb:

(1) taytap-hay!
answer-do.inf
‘Anwser me!’

LVCs are “split constructions” (Bak 2011: 222) which are made up of a noun that serves as semantic head (taytap ‘answer’) and a distinct morphological head (ha- ‘do’). The latter of those is a light verb, and the semantic head is its complement. A semantic requirement for light verbs is that their meaning must be primitive and, by that, suitable for many contexts.
I will touch upon some of the questions of whether the lightness of verbs can be gradient, and whether there should be a requirement for a verb to also exist as the ‘heavy’ version of itself in order to count as proper light verb (as claimed by Butt 2003, 2010) or rather, whether LVs can be placed on a grammaticalization cline (as claimed by Rhee & Koo 2014). The basis of this discussion is the use of the (possibly light) Korean verbs ha- ‘do’, sikhi- ‘order’ and mantul- ‘order/produce’ in their heavy, light, and causative uses.

Selected references:
Bak, Jaehee. (2011). The light verb construction in Korean. University of Toronto dissertation.
Butt, Miriam. (2003). The Light Verb Jungle. Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics 9. 1–28.
Butt, Miriam. (2010). The Light Verb Jungle: Still Hacking Away. Complex predicates in cross-linguistic perspective. 48–78.
Rhee, Seongha & Hyung Jung Koo. (2014). Grammaticalization of causatives and passives and their recent development into stance markers in Korean. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 50(3). 309–337.

Info

Tag: 05.11.2022
Anfangszeit: 11:15
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: Wiwi-Bunker —Room 5050
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Sprache: en

Programm 72. StuTS