Discourse Filler or Topic Marker

Abstract

The present paper examines 196 Korean narratives of three age groups-77 6-year-old, 79 11-year-old children, and 40 adults--and explores the phenomenon where Korean young children tend to use the politeness sentence ending -yo inside the sentence, in particular, after NPs, as in Mina-ka-yo. We postulated two hypotheses: 1) It is a discourse filler coming from the children's limited cognitive processing ability. 2) It is a topic marker children temporarily employ at the stage where they have not fully acquired discourse competence, especially the topic marker -nun. In the experiment, the subjects were each asked to tell a story while looking at a series of 10 pictures in accordance with a given title. Some of the subjects had a chance to look at the pictures before telling the story (Preview Condition), and some did not (No Preview Condition). We hypothesize that if the first hypothesis, -yo as a filler, is correct, the younger children and the subjects in No-Preview Condition are expected to use more -yos as fillers from the heavier burden of processing. The results confirm this hypothesis. If the second hypothesis is correct, we hypothesized, i) it will occur before the acquisition of nun and ka, the 'so-called' topic marker and subject marker in Korean, is established, and ii) it will be used more after subject NPs, the most topical element in the sentence. The results also confirm that the appearance of NP+-yo is closely connected with the development of the particles, and that there was a hierarchy of Subject > Object> Oblique such that object NPs +-yo occurred only in those where subject NPs +-yo were found, and oblique NPs +-yo occurred only in those where object NPs + -yos were found. In conclusion, the evidence suggests that both of the hypotheses cannot be rejected. If we accept Slobin's argument that "the acquisition of functions precedes the acquisition of forms", it seems that Korean children are using the available form for the functions they need.