A Diachronic Change of Negation Variation in Spoken Korean: from the 17<SUP>th</SUP> century to the 2010s

Abstract

This study aims to explore how negation variation between short-negation (S-Neg) and long-negation (L-Neg) has changed in spoken Korean. Concerning the topic, two research questions were addressed: 1) how negation variation has changed in spoken Korean from the 17^th century to the 2010s? 2) how can the change be explained linguistically? To answer these questions, 1,894 negative sentences were collected from oral literature and drama scripts between the 17^th century and the 2010s and the proportion of L-Neg in the data was calculated along the time. The results revealed that 1) L-Neg has never spread widely in the Kyeongsang/Cheolla dialects while it had prevailed in the Seoul dialect and has declined until the 2010s; 2) A morpho-syntactic constraint of S-Neg, which was claimed to result in the spread of L-Neg in Middle Korean (Park, 2005, 2011) was lost in contemporary Korean. Based on the findings, I suggest that the decline of L-Neg in spoken Korean is ascribed to the loss of the S-Neg constraint and propose a morpho-syntactic change of the negative word an(i) in S-Neg.