The way of truth : The case of the Korean discourse marker cincca in comparison with Chinese zhenshi and zhende

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Abstract

Korean has a number of discourse markers (DMs) of Chinese origin, which carry similar and different functions as compared to Chinese source lexemes. Despite their significance, they have not received much attention, hence the rationale of the present study. The goal of the study is to compare DMs of the same origin in Korean and Chinese to identify similarities and differences, based on the data taken from historical and contemporary sources. The Korean DM cincca ‘a true thing’, composed of cin ‘tru(th)’ and the nominalizer cca ‘thing, person’, presents an interesting grammaticalization scenario into diverse discourse functions. The findings demonstrate that in addition to its original nominal function, the DM also carries an adjectival function of adding genuineness or excellence in quality to a modified noun or an adverbial function of adding emphasis to an adjective or a predicate. From this intensifying function there arise diverse DM functions through the interaction of the source meaning of ‘truthfulness’ and diverse inferences from the discourse contexts. The Chinese DMs involving the same etymon are zhende (from zhen ‘true’ and de ‘nominalizer’) and zhenshi (from zhen ‘true’ and shi ‘be so’). The functions of these two DMs are similar to those of the Korean cincca , but the Chinese DM zhenshi is negatively-biased by marking the speaker’s negative evaluation of the referenced person or event. An exploration on grammaticalization processes and functions in the two languages reveals much commonality but some differences in terms of functional distribution, prosody, and the extent of desemanticization.

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About the authors

Seongha Rhee

Mahidol University; Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

Email: srhee@hufs.ac.kr
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0312-0975

Professor of Linguistics at Mahidol University, Thailand and Professor Emeritus at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas, Austin in 1996. His primary research interest is to identify cognitive and discursive mechanisms that enable language change from the crosslinguistic and typological perspectives. He published World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (co-author, 2019, CUP); book chapters in The Cambridge Handbook of Korean Linguistics (2022, CUP); and research articles in Nature, Journal of Pragmatics, Language Sciences, Russian Journal of Linguistics and Lingua, among others.

Nakhon Pathom, Thailand; Seoul, Republic of Korea

Lin Zhang

Seoul National University

Author for correspondence.
Email: linwkd@snu.ac.kr
ORCID iD: 0009-0004-3826-536X

doctoral candidate in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Seoul National University. Her primary research interests focus on historical development of lexical and grammatical forms in Korean, as well as comparative diachronic studies between Korean and Chinese

Seoul, Republic of Korea

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