The Evolution of Korean Dative Markers:Its Formal and Cognitive Motivations

Abstract

This article examines the grammaticalization process of the Korean dative markers -eykey, -hanthey, -tele, and -pwokwo based on the two motivations for grammaticalization. The first motivation, frequency, is explained by providing token frequencies of each marker in the largest historical corpus available in Korean. All four dative markers arose through the highly frequent usages of their source constructions, though several cases cannot be fully accounted for solely based on this frequency effect. The apparent exceptions are explained based on the functional nature of grammaticalization. The second motivation, the semantic-pragmatic motivation, is explained within the cognitive linguistics framework, which views linguistic meaning as a manifestation of conceptual structure. More specifically, we argue that the four dative markers arose through various semantic-pragmatic mechanisms, which stem from the conceptualization of meaning. Although the specific semanticfunctional motivations for the four dative markers vary, the driving force of the motivations is deeply rooted in our conceptualization of meaning and our embodied cognition. Our semantic analysis of the grammaticalization of the dative markers is based on these conceptualization theses of cognitive semantics.