Emergence of Discourse Markers of Uncertainty in English and Korean and their Functional Extension: Grammaticalization and Discourse-Cognitive Strategic Perspectives

Abstract

Korean and English have a number of discourse markers (DMs) that signal the speaker’s epistemic attitude of uncertainty (Uncertainty DMs; UDMs). English UDMs develop from three major conceptual categories, i.e., mental predicates, sortal modifiers, and lexemes denoting certainty. Korean UDMs develop from five major conceptual categories, i.e., questions, interrogatives, minimizers, sortal modifiers, and contingency connectives. Even though the two languages have only one conceptual category, i.e., sortal predicates, as a common conceptual source, each source category member in the two languages undergoes change that contributes to the ‘uncertainty’ semantics through selective focus on diverse aspects of the meaning of the source lexemes and expressions. This paper shows that the members in the source categories form a complex network due to their conceptual affinity to each other.