Discourse Functions of -Ketun and -Tela in Spoken Korean

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the discourse functions of sentence-ending suffixes -ketun and -tela by looking at their interaction in modern spoken Korean. The data consists of 10 narrative corpora, collected in 2001 as part of ‘the Seoul Dialect Project’ by the National Institute of Korean Language, and 91 spoken corpora, made public by ‘the 21st Century Sejong Project.’ The narrative corpora include 10 middle-aged speakers from the Seoul region talking about their childhood. The spoken corpora include 40 monologues, 35 everyday conversations, five telephone conversations, and 11 thematic discussions. The results show that the -ketun and -tela sequences are usually used by a single speaker, and the -ketun to -tela sequence is more common than the other way around. A close examination of -ketun to -tela sequences shows that -ketun marks the background or setting for what the speaker is trying to say, which is marked by the following -tela. On the other hand, -tela to -ketun sequences show that -tela marks the speaker’s observation, which is followed by -ketun marking its cause or reason. It seems that -tela usually marks the speaker’s focus because of the unexpectedness or surprise element in its inherent meaning. Overall, it seems that the results of this study confirm those by previous studies on them by examining their interaction in spoken discourse.