문법화의 의미일반성 딜레마:한국어 자빠지다 를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper explores the grammaticalization phenomena displayed by the Korean verb cappacita and the verbs from which it was derived, i.e. cita, and ppacita, with a special focus on their morphosyntactic and semantic dimensions. More importantly, attention has been paid on the fact that the verb eventually developed into a viewpoint marker, signaling the speaker's negative attitude toward the proposition it predicates of. This is an exemplar par excellence of subjectification(Traugott 1982). In literature semantic generality has been considered an important element for grammaticalization, often claimed to be a prerequisite for a lexeme to be grammaticalized. However, this verb cappacita is quite specific in its semantics, contra the semantic generality claim. This paper argues that semantic generality may not be applicable across the board in grammaticalization, because negative viewpoints, in fact, require quite specific semantic substance from which the grammatical concept of undesirability-viewpoints may arise. An implication is that there is a dilemma for a gram to reconcile between the requirement of semantic substantiality and semantic generality. In arguing for the semantic substantiality for negative viewpoints, this paper also suggests that semantically general motion verbs, such as kata 'go' and ota 'come', develop into viewpoint markers without semantic specificity, because they derive the required semantic components from their deictic meaning, which provides the conceptualizers with deictic center/periphery as their reference points for good/bad evaluation.