High applicatives in Korean causatives and passives

This paper examines the distribution of the Korean voice morpheme, -I, which marks two different syntactic contexts, morphological causatives and adversity clauses. A central proposal is that the -I morpheme can appear in the two different contexts due to a shared syntactic property, namely a high instrumental applicative structure (ApplP). Evidence from binding facts and the adverb modification of ‘on purpose’ indicates that the -I morpheme is inserted into the head that embeds a high applicative phrase but not other types of phrases; for example, vDOP or VoiceP that requires an intentional agent argument in its specifier. Korean provides evidence for refining Pylkkänenʹs complement selection by showing that in a verb-selecting causative an instrumental Appl can introduce a causee. It is also shown that the result of this refinement provides evidence in favor of distinguishing the semantics of Appl from that of Voice, which was not explicitly argued or claimed in the previous literature: agentivity is particular to Voice, not to Appl.