From ‘favor’ to ‘cause’: the English causal adposition thanks to and its Korean counterpart tekpwuney  

Oleh:

Ahn, Mikyung

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 32 no. 5 (2010), page 579-587.
Topik: Causal complex adposition Korean Meaning change Polygrammaticalization
Fulltext: vol. 32 issue 5 September, 2010. p. 579-587.pdf (312.99KB)

Isi artikel

This study explores the historical evolution of the English causal adposition thanks to and its Korean counterpart tekpwuney from the prespective of grammaticalization, comparing and contrasting the two adpositions to show the commonalities and differences. These two adpositions show differences in morphosyntactic changes. The grammatical form thanks to has undergone a general evolution whereby a lexical item (i.e. a noun) thank in combination with a preposition to turns into the grammatical item (i.e. a complex preposition) thanks to. Its Korean counterpart tekpwuney, however, has undergone polygrammaticalization: a noun tekpwun ‘favor’ combined with a locative –ey develops into a request mood marker tekpwuney ‘please’ on one hand, and evolves into a causal complex postposition tekpwuney ‘thanks to’ and further into a discourse marker on the other hand. In addition, the postpositional phrase ku tekpwuney ‘thanks to it’ changes into a sentential adverb tekpwuney ‘consequently.’ In contrast to the morphosyntactic changes, thanks to and tekpwuney have undergone similar semantic extensions, which can be explained in terms of the Source Determination Hypothesis (Bybee et al., 1994). The fact that the source lexemes of the two adpositions have the same meaning, i.e. ‘favor’ has triggered their similar semantic evolution [favor > - cause]. This analysis identifies meaningful universals that shed light on how particular linguistic systems are linked to more universal principles of language development and suggests how meaning change is motivated by cognitive principles independent of specific languages.

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