The Development of Interrogatives as Discourse Markers

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the development of Korean interrogativesmwue `what`, we

`why`, edi `where`, ence `when`, and mwusun `which` as discourse markers. Based on 679

modern Korean spoken corpora, which amounts to about 6 million words, including TV or

radio programs, lectures, every-day conversations and so on, the present study will

attempt to provide a unified account of the grammaticalization and discourse functions of

all six interrogative pronouns. The results of this study will show that there is a historical

intermediate stage along the path from interrogatives to discourse markers in Korean

Korean interrogatives were first used as indefinite pronouns productively and the indefinite

meaning became easily redundant in speech. The process of losing their lexical meanings

as indefinite pronouns to acquire new functions in discourse will be shown to be a nice

example of subejctification in Traugott`s (Traugott 1988; Traugott 1989) sense. This paper

will show that each interrogative has gone through the grammaticalization process at a

different speed and expresses the speaker`s (inter)subjective meanings in discourse.