The Power of the Unspoken: Ellipsis and Grammaticalization in Korean and Beyond

Seongha Rhee

doi:10.17002/sil..56.202007.1

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한국중원언어학회
언어학 연구 학술저널
언어학연구 제56호
2020.7 1 - 36 (36page)
DOI : 10.17002/sil..56.202007.1

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Seongha Rhee (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

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Korean has a large inventory of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in contemporary Korean, many of which originated from connectives through the so-called insubordination. This paper addresses the grammaticalization of such connective-turned SFPs and discourse markers from two source categories, i.e., connectives and complementizers. Unlike regular SFPs that encode grammatical notions related to politeness, honorification and speech-act types, these innovative enders signal the speaker’s stance. Based on these developments, some theoretically prominent issues are discussed from the perspective of grammaticalization theory, such as discursive motivations, pragmatic inferences, intersubjectification and interactivity, and structure-based functional innovation. Of particular importance is the emergence of intersubjective, stance-related functions in the existing grammatical formants, which occur at the utterance-final position. Based on the insubordination phenomenon widely attested across languages, this paper intends to show how ‘silence’ becomes grammar, i.e., how the addressees try to infer the withheld information by relying on the situational and linguistic context and how repeated inferences create entirely new meanings, a process that can be labeled as linguistic creatio ex nihilo.

#ellipsis #insubordination #grammaticalization #connective #sentence-final particle