This study acknowledges that affectedness is a fundamental semantic property of Korean passive constructions and argues that passives entailing bodily involvement constitute a systematic subconstruction within this broader domain. Adopting a usage-based construction grammar approach, this research analyzes corpus data from the New Yonsei Corpus regarding verbs such as eophi-da ‘be carried on the back’, angi-da ‘be hugged’, and maedalli-da ‘hang onto’. The usage analysis demonstrates that the undergoer is not merely a passive recipient of an action, but an active participant who establishes and maintains physical attachment through bodily coordination. Consequently, this construction is characterized by the undergoer’s physical performance involvement, which is structured around a mandatory foundation of physical adjustment and a variable layer of active induction. Furthermore, evidence from boundary cases indicates that when these conditions are not satisfied in the usage context, the performance-involved interpretation is not foregrounded. Based on these results, this study proposes a constructional network wherein performance-involved passives systematically instantiate the higher-level affectedness schema as a specialized sub-category.
Sejin Yoo (Thu,) studied this question.