# Passive Death



## branchsnapper

Korean students of English often seem to say "was died".

Does the verb to die 'chugessoyo' (spelling?) in Korean have a passive built into it? Since Korean just has an "ee" sound to make a passive I find them rather hard to spot.


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## want8

Hi!

'chugesseoyo (죽겠어요)' literally means 'I think I'm going to die', 'Something's killing me', 'I'm having such a hard time'.
'chugeosseoyo (죽었어요)' or 'chugeosseo (죽었어)' means that someone died, but this doesn't have a passive built into it.
I don't know why Korean students often use 'was died'.

In a rough guess, there aren't many passive usages in Korean language so Koreans easily fail to distinguish 'to die' from 'to kill'.

Beginners have hard time understanding the difference between transitive verbs and intransitive verbs.


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## 조금만

want8 said:


> [...]
> I don't know why Korean students often use 'was died'.
> [...]



I think I can offer a tentative explanation. This whole area of active/passive, transitive/intransitive, to which we need in the case of Korean to add the category of causatives, as I'll indicate in a moment, is a minefield not only for students, but for academic linguists, especially those interested in contrastive aspects of various languages.

Presumably all languages have expressions for CAUSE TO DIE on the one hand and SUFFER DEATH on the other. Most European languages express CAUSE TO DIE by what in the jargon is called a lexical causative. Put less intimidatingly, in those languages, the word expressing CAUSE TO DIE is a completely different word from the one expressing SUFFER DEATH. So we have _to kill_ vs _to die_,  _tuer_ vs _mourir_, _töten_ vs _sterben_ and so on. 

Not so in Korean. There, CAUSE TO DIE is expressed using the same root word as SUFFER DEATH. You get from the latter to the former by adding something to that rootword, not by using a different word altogether. Linguists call this a derived or inflexional (rather than a lexical) causative. (Tagalog is similar: there too CAUSE TO DIE and SUFFER DEATH are both expressed by different modifications to the same root, _patay_.)

The problem is that native speakers of languages, such as Korean, which make extensive use of derivational/inflexional causatives are tempted to try to form causatives in the same way in European languages, modifying the root "die" instead of selecting the different lexical item "kill". Sometimes this works. But in this case it plainly doesn't, as this tendency to say '*he was died' indicates. However, very young English children can sometimes be heard to say "*he deaded him", suggesting that the necessity to use a lexical rather than an inflexional causative is something that challenges even native learners of the language.

There's a lot more to this, of course. The boundaries, in all languages, between causatives, passives, and transitives/intransitives prove to be much more fluid in observed usage than pedagogical grammars try to make out. The best discussion I personally know of this topic where Korean is concerned, which I'd recommend to anyone who can cope with the terminology (and the use of Yale romanization for the examples) comes in Chapters 5 and 6 of Jaehoon Yeon's _Korean Grammatical Constructions: their Form and Meaning_, London 2003 (ISBN 1 872843 26 3), which has many futher references to the literature on the topic, including the main Korean-language ones.


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