Rise and fall of a discourse marker

Abstract

The Korean discourse marker kisil(un) presents an interesting grammaticalisation scenario. It began its life as a borrowing from Chinese, a syntactic construction to mean ‘that/its fruit’ in Middle Korean, and developed into a single lexeme with more abstract meanings, e.g., ‘essence, reality, fact, truth’ and further grammaticalised into a discourse marker signalling the speaker’s diverse stances in discourse contexts. As it was a borrowing from Chinese, its initial uses carried pedanticism and became officially banned in Modern Korean as part of efforts for ‘language purism’. The journey of kisil(un) exhibits subjectification in meaning and inter-subjectification in function. In particular, speakers use it to invite the interlocutor to some common ground. In discourse it also signals assertiveness and thus rarely co-occurs with hesitance markers. Unlike most discourse markers, kisil(un) does not have much positional freedom but occurs mostly between the subject and the predicate, bridging two contrasting propositions.