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Remarks on the Discourse Marker ‘ㅣ’ in Middle Korean

  • Korean Language & Literature
  • 2007, (63), pp.79-103
  • Publisher : Korean Language & Literature
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature

이희두 1

1원광대

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ABSTRACT

The addition of ‘ㅣ’ at the end of the verb final stem, the name of persons and animals were very productive in Middle Korean. However the reason and mechanism of the addition of ‘ㅣ’ were not explicitely explained yet. In this paper I suggested that ‘ㅣ’ was a discourse marker which increased the familiarity and efficiency of a communication. This marker did not change the propositional meaning and the category of part of speech and then I also insisted that it was a linguistic element on the level of a spoken language, not a written language. This discourse marker was first emerged after the name of persons by way of the grammaticalization of the subject marker ‘ㅣ’. A grammaticalization did expand the grmmatical properties by the change from a lexical status to grammatical status, from a derivational forms to a inflectional forms, from the less grammaticl forms to the more grammatical forms. However all the lexical items were not grammaticized but only a few of the lexical items were according to the usage frequency. On the basis of this point of view, a syntagmatic structure ‘personal name＋subject marker ‘ㅣ’’ which had a high usage frequency was grammaticized by a psychological reanalysis and so the concept of grammatical relation of the subject marker was abstractively changed to the familiar relations of the discourse marker. Whenever this discourse marker ‘ㅣ’ was additioned to the final vowel of stems, a falling dipthongs were appeared owing to the vowel system of that time. Through a 18C this vowel system was drastically changed by a monothongization. As the result of this vowel change the discourse marker ‘ㅣ’ was developed to the feature [fronted] by the more grammaticalization and then this discourse marker feature of the contemporary Korean has been addited to the word initial on the contrary to the Middle Korean.

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