A Contrastive Study on Potential Voice between Korean and Turkish

Potential voice is a type of voice continuum that represents not only situations involving expressions of ease or difficulty of occurrence of an event but also quality judgments. Korean passive markers have polysemous uses that can represent potential and spontaneous voices. Turkish passive and reflexive markers also have similar meaning boundaries to Korean, but Turkish potential can represent the ability of an experiencer in terms of perceptive verbs except for other types. However, Korean potential represents the wider scope of an experiencer’s ability. A contrastive analysis of the potential voices of Koreans and Turkish revealed that the potential voice has a close relationship with the spontaneous, emotional middle, and cognitive middle voices, and these relationships can be confirmed in the semantic maps.