On an emerging paradigm of sentence-final particles of discontent: a grammaticalization perspective

Abstract

Korean has an impressive inventory of sentence-final particles (SFPs) that appear as clusters of verbal morphology. The last slot of the SFP cluster is for sentence type indicators, such as declarative, interrogative, imperative, and hortative. However, a new paradigm of SFPs is emerging in contemporary Korean, those that mark the speaker’s discontent. This interesting phenomenon has not received any attention in earnest to date. The new SFPs of discontent (SFPDs) are -tam, -lam, -kam, and -nam, developed through different paths of grammaticalization, but commonly involving an interrogative marking. One of the sources involves the fusion of a discourse marker originated from an interrogative pronoun. The fusion of a formerly free-standing discourse marker into the verbal morphology is an instance of grammaticalization rarely attested across languages. This paper argues that the emergence of the discontent meaning in SFPDs is directly attributable to the sources, i.e., interrogative words and constructions used in the contexts of challenge. Another noteworthy aspect is that the SFPD paradigm is still defective in that not all sentence-type indicators have the SFPD counterparts, i.e., it excludes true interrogatives and hortatives. This suggests that SFPDs, which should be highly intersubjective due to the defining characteristic of the SFP category in Korean, take the form of highly subjective and non-interactional clause types such as the ‘audience-blind’ styles, and feign non-intersubjectivity. The use of feigned non-intersubjectivity is a discourse strategy for indirectness, which is intricately interlaced with the speaker’s attitudinal stance-marking. The indirectness further expands to counter-expectation, thus bringing forth the mirativity and exclamative functions.