A Contrastive Analysis on Intransitive-transitive Alternations in English and Korean

This study examines intransitive-transitive verb alternations in English and Korean. It aims to find out cross-linguistic factors complicating the transitive variation between English and Korean. Thus, this study is concerned with a variety of construction types of English intransitive-transitive verbs and their Korean equivalents in relation to semantic extensions from the prototype. It is argued that in English, a less-prototypical verb (i.e., semantically-deviant verb from the transitive verb prototype) is coded syntactically as a member of the class of the transitive prototype--as its canonical phrase structure NPNOM-VTR-NPACC shows--through a metaphoric extension. In Korean, however, this kind of semantic extension is likely to be restricted by the morphological distinction, that is, transitivizing or intransitivizing morphology on the object, which lends more asymmetrical meaning to the relationship between two NPs.