Transitivity, or the linguistic realization of transitive events, is a basic linguistic phenomenon across languages. This study examines how far and in what ways the linguistic realization of transitivity in Korean can be varied with respect to typological variations. Thus, this study aims at demonstrating that the expression of transitivity in Korean is closely related to diverse linguistic phenomena such as morphosyntactic constraints on transitivity and semantic extensions in grammaticalization. As for the language-specific factors that characterize transitivity in Korean, it is proposed that as a SOV-language and a topic-prominent language, Korean shows a tendency that morphological devices and limited semantic exten- sions play a significant role in the degree of transitivity.

• Kyung Yul Kim(Kanwon National University)