The NSM-based Approach to a Korean Discourse Marker: jom

Abstract

Many studies on discourse markers (DMs) have been argued on how to define DMs, what their characteristics are and how to analyze them. Although there are generally no accepted definitions of DMs, prosodic and syntactic independence and semantic indetermination are widely accepted. Researchers try to elucidate semantic indetermination or polyfunctionality of DMs in various theoretical approaches such as Argumentation Theory (Watts 1988), Relevance Theory (Blakemore 2002), the Polyfunctional or polysemous approach (Fraser 1999, 2006), and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach (Travis 2005, 2006; Fischer 2000). The application of NSM to the field of DMs is different and not common but can explicitly capture the core and pragmatic meanings of a DM, avoiding terminological ambiguities (Travis 2005, 2006). This paper employs the NSM approach and analyzes the functions and the pragmatic meanings of a Korean DM jom with semantic primitives of the NSM system. This paper illustrates how the core meaning of the DM jom relates to the original lexical adverb jogeum 'a little bit' and that the DM has four pragmatic functions: a hedge word for requests and offers; utterance highlight; utterance mitigation; utterance avoidance or hesitation. Through the NSM-based analysis, this paper also shows the relationship between the core semantic meaning of the DM jom and the contextual pragmatic meanings and how to link them.