Negotiating common ground in discourse : a diachronic and discourse analysis of maliya in Korean

Abstract

Using a combined diachronic and discourse analytic framework, this paper examines the development of a lexical noun mal (‘word’) in Korean into a pragmatic marker maliya. This study has two major foci: first, we investigate the discourse functions of maliya as a common ground marker, and in so doing provide a more uniform treatment of the various uses of maliya which was lacking in the extant literature; second, we show more clearly how non-subjective complementations, in this case involving constructions with mal as a complementizer, come to be reinterpreted as subjective and intersubjective constructions with maliya syntactically and pragmatically reanalyzed as a pragmatic marker.