A contrastive study of Japanese and Korean negative sensitive items: a grammaticalization approach

Abstract

Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in Japanese and Korean are words (or expressions) used only in negative contexts. Negative Sensitivity in Japanese and Korean, as in many other languages, is an intricate phenomenon which involves syntactic, semantic and even pragmatic dimensions. Recently there has been a growing interest in the nature of sika-nai (sika) ‘only’ in Japanese and pakkey-anhta (pakkey) ‘only’ in Korean whose meanings are similar to each other. In relation to this point, this paper treats another similar NSI, hoka-nai (hoka) ‘only’ in Japanese, which the previous relevant studies have comparatively neglected. What makes the NSIs in Japanese and Korean further intriguing as an object of inquiry are (i) their synchrony and diachrony, in particular their grammaticalization processes into the NSIs and (ii) their typological and areal linguistic properties. This paper has two goals. The first is to examine how sika/hoka in Japanese and pakkey in Korean are different. In addition, this paper explores how hoka is different from sika and pakkey. In fact, most previous studies treat sika and pakkey as the same expressions. So are sika and hoka. The second goal is to explain what makes the discrepancies between sika, hoka and pakkey. In other words, this study clarifies what theoretical issues bring about these discrepancies. In pursuit of those goals, this paper employs panchronic and cross-linguistic approaches. In particular, this study focuses on the grammaticalization processes into NSIs/postpositional particles of sika, hoka and pakkey. For this reason, this study is entirely different from the past ones, in that it explains the linguistic differences between sika, hoka and pakkey by the grammaticalization approach. Furthermore, this paper proposes innovative conclusions related to the NSIs in Japanese and Korean, which the previous studies have never pointed out. Additionally, this study holds that the framework of grammaticzalization can be another good approach which carries out a cross-linguistic study for examining the nature of the NSIs Japanese and Korean. Focusing on some theoretical issues such as dialect contact, synonymic collision, unidirectionality, decategorization, metaphor, specialization, degrammaticalization and frequency, this paper argues that the NSIs in Japanese and Korean show differences in the patterns of grammaticalization processes into NSIs/postpositional particles.