Chongwon Park & Sook-kyung Lee
University of Minnesota Duluth & Korea University
This paper investigates the grammaticalization process of four Negative Polarity Items (NPI’s) in Modern Korean, i.e., cenhye, pyellwo, keylkwo, chama, by conducting extensive empirical study. In order to find the diachronic pathways of these four NPI’s, we dealt with the largest ‘historical’ corpus (Sejong Balanced Corpus) in Korean which contains 16.5 million syllables. Although NPI’s in other languages have been well-treated from a corpus-linguistics perspective (Hoeksema 1994 for Dutch among others, etc.), little attention has been paid to Korean partly because of the lack of ‘tag’ information in the given corpus, which thus contains no spacing between words (and even between sentences). By using a recently developed extraction tool available in public domain in conjunction with our own computational tool, we extracted all constructions that contain those four forms from 15th century to early 20th century documents.
Our findings are summarized as follows. First, the NPI’s cenhye and pyellwo were formed by attaching native affixes (-hye and -lwo) to Sino-stems to mean ‘perfectly’ and ‘especially’, respectively. The form cenhye was first attested in 15th century and was used as an adverb meaning ‘perfectly’ as shown by one representative example (1). It was not until early 20th century when cenhye first acquired the negative polarity property. During this period, the adverb cenhye began to be frequently used with the negation morphemes such as mos- and anh- as in (2). Having been sufficiently repeated in a negation construction, the adverb was reanalyzed as a pair with negation morphemes. Since emergence of this new usage, the original usage had been obliterated to yield a Modern Korean NPI. The NPI pyellwo underwent a similar change except that the form pyellow was attested a bit later than cenhye in 17th century as in (3). Since then, similar to cenhye, frequency played a crucial role in the NPI formation of pyellwo.
Second, the other set of NPI’s (chama and kyelkwo) can be accounted for by a different grammaticalization process than that of cenhye and pyellwo. The two forms chama and kyelkwo were first attested as verbs cham-ta ‘endure’ and kyelha-ta ‘decide’ as illustrated in (4). Since 16th century, these verbs had been used in a semantically negative context where there was no overt syntactic negation as shown in (5). For instance, as a rhetorical question, (5) carries semantically negative information to actually mean ‘I cannot endure to live comfortably by leaving the dead in the empty mountain’. This restriction in semantics was extended to require an overt syntactic negation marking by sharing the semantic negative property with a syntactic form, which may be analogous to the formation of the French ne ~ pas (Hopper and Traugott 2003). Notwithstanding the fact that these two NPIs’ original meanings are fully obliterated in Modern Korean, different usages of these two forms in Modern Korean exhibit some traces of their originally different semantics. That is to say, while chama mainly co-occurs with the negation morphemes mos- and –ul swu eps-ta in Modern Korean (these negation morphemes are used in a context of ‘not able to’), kyelkwo is used with an- and ani-ta (these two negation morphemes are used in a context of ‘do not want to’). These co-occurrence restrictions can be accounted for by the two source verbs’ semantic differences in their original usages.
Due to the limitation of space, here we did not provide detailed grammaticalization pathways of these NPI’s, nor did we provide more accurate token/type frequencies which motivated the grammaticalization of these NPI’s. We hope to have an opportunity to present our paper to show the results in detail and to have further discussions concerning these issues.
(1) Cenhye i twongsan-on namki tyoho-lssoy
perfectly this hill-TOP tree good-COMP
‘This hill has a perfectly good tree’
(15th Sekpwosangcel)
(2) tewuk a(l)-ti mosho-mye cenhye a(l)-ti mosho-mye
more know-NOM cannot-COMP entirely know-NOM cannot-COMP
‘(We) do not entirely know (something)’
(15th Nungemkyengenhay)
pwuthye-lul cenhye nyemho-ti aniho-sowo-myen
Buddha-ACC entirely consider-NOM don’t-HON-COMP
‘If we do not entirely consider Buddha’
(15th Nungemkyengenhay)
(3) Wuli pyellwo sa-l caymwul-ul uynwonho-wotoy
We specially buy-ADN good-ACC discuss-COMP
‘We especially discussed (what) we have to buy’
(17th Nwokeltayenhay)
Swoca-i pyellwo thwosan-ul kacyewo-n kes-i ep-kwo
I-NOM specially local.product-ACC bring-ADN thing-NOM not.exist-COMP
‘I did not specially bring any product’
(18th Pakthwongsaenhay)
(4) cwungsayng-i …… kwonoy-lol cal chom-a
mankind-NOM …… suffering-ACC well endure-COMP
‘People well endure the suffering’
(15th Welinsekpwo)
Tyengmin-i …… cwukum-ol kyelho-ye
Tyengmin-NOM…… death-ACC decide-COMP
‘Tyengmin decided to die’
(17th Twongsin samkanghayngsildo)
(5) Cwuk-un salom-ul pwuy-n mwuy-hoy twu-kwo
Die-AF man-ACC empty-ADN mountain-LOC leave-CONJ
nay ei chom-a pheynan-hi kecheyho-lio
I how endure-AF comfortable-ADVZ live-AF
‘How can I live well leaving the dead in the empty mountain?’
(17th Twongsin samkanghayngsildo)
Selected References:
Bybee, Joan L and Paul Hopper. 2001. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Hoeksema, Jacob. 1994. “On the grammaticalization of negative polarity items.” Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual
Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. by S. Gahl, A. Dolbey and C. Johnson, 273-282.
Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Hoeksema, Jack, Hotze Rulmann, Victor Sanchez-Valencia, Ton Van Der Woude. 2001. Perspectives on
Negation and Polarity Items. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Hopper, Paul and Elizabeth C. Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization (Second Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
