Secondary grammaticalization and subjectification: A case study of Korean conditional, concessive, and deontic modal eya

Abstract

Using diachronic corpus data, this study investigates the developmental journey of the Korean connective eya, which denotes conditional, concessive, and deontic modal meanings. The study proposes that eya consists of the connective e ‘and (then)’, ‘after’ and the focus particle ya, which can be read as ‘only’ or ‘even’ depending on context. At first, focus ya with the meaning of ‘only’ was attached to connective e ‘after’ to emphasize the temporal meaning. Their combination eya ‘only after’, serving as temporal background for the following main clause, grammaticalized into conditional eya ‘only if’. Subsequently, conditional eya ‘only if’ developed into concessive conditional eya ‘even if’ by occurring with extreme values, and this eventually became concessive eya ‘even though’. In addition, this study offers counter-evidence to recent proposals that secondary grammaticalization does not involve subjectification or even leads to the loss of subjective or expressive meanings. As in the case of eya, concessive markers often emerge from existing grammatical markers, and their grammaticalization usually involves increased subjectivity (e.g., speaker's surprise at an event countering expectations), rather than its loss.