Grammar
-(으)ㄴ 바 있다
Meaning
Advanced-(eu)n ba itda
States that something has happened before, in the register of written reporting. 바 is a formal bound noun standing for a fact or an instance, and 있다 says such an instance is on the record, so 상을 받은 바 있습니다 is closer to there is a prior instance of the company receiving an award than to a personal memory of it. News uses it to attach background to the event being reported — the earlier award, the earlier statement, the earlier ruling — so the new fact is read against something that already happened.
Form
Verb stem + -(으)ㄴ 바 있다: -ㄴ 바 있다 after a vowel-final stem (발표한 바 있다), -은 바 있다 after a consonant (받은 바 있다). -(으)ㄴ is the completed modifier, so the event in front of 바 is always already finished, and the past is never marked twice — 받은 바 있다, not 받았은 바 있다. Tense and politeness sit on 있다 instead (있습니다, 있었다), and the negative is -(으)ㄴ 바 없다. The same bound noun 바 turns up in other fixed frames — 아는 바 없다, 앞서 말한 바와 같이 — which are the same word but not this pattern.
Examples
그 회사는 지난해에도 상을 받은 바 있습니다.
The company had also received an award last year.
Common mistakes & nuance
The everyday way to say the same thing is -(으)ㄴ 적이 있다, and the two do not swap in tone: 바 있다 belongs to press releases, court reporting and official statements, and putting it into conversation sounds like reading aloud from a document. It also does a job 적이 있다 does not — 적이 있다 reports experience, while 바 있다 cites a matter of record, which is why an official denial in the news comes out as 언급한 바 없다 rather than 언급한 적이 없다. Do not read continuing relevance into it either: the form says only that the instance exists in the past, and whether it still matters is what the rest of the sentence is for.
Similar grammar
- -(으)ㄴ/는 것
바 and 것 are both bound nouns that turn a clause into something a sentence can talk about, but 것 is the everyday one and goes anywhere, while 바 is formal and survives mainly inside fixed frames like this one, 아는 바 and 말한 바와 같이. The two are not interchangeable even where both parse: 받은 것이 있다 is about a thing that was received, and 받은 바 있다 is about the fact of receiving having occurred.
- -던/-았던
Both point back at something already over, but they land in different parts of the sentence. -았던 modifies a noun and recalls the past event as a description of it (상을 받았던 회사, the company that received the award). -(으)ㄴ 바 있다 is a predicate and asserts the prior event itself, which is what lets a news sentence add it as a fact of its own instead of folding it into a noun phrase.