Mwe-l: Its Grammatical Development and Interpretation as “Surprisal/Disapproval”

This paper investigates mwe-l ‘what’ questions in Korean. As a starting point, we collect mwe-l question sentences from Wulimal Saym (Our Speech Spring). In examining them, we note that on top of its use as an interjection, it can also be used as a questioning word, corresponding to what in English but interpreted as why. We argue that it has developed from mwe-(lo) (because of what) where -(u)lo is a particle expressing reason or cause. Crucially, the lateral -l is inserted between mwe-l and the particle for the sake of phonetic articulation. We move on to note that in Korean both mwe-l and mwue/mwe construct rhetorical-like surprise/disapproval questions. Following Caponigro and Sprouse’s (2007) and Celle’s (2018) pragmatic characterization of rhetorical- like surprise/disapproval questions in general, we show these constructions at issue are not only interpreted as information-seeking ordinary questions but also as expressing a speaker’s surprise and disapproval because of his/her expectation conflicting with the described state-of-affairs.