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Abstract

Analyzing diachronic and synchronic corpus data and utilizing the theoretical approaches of grammaticalization and intersubjectification, this study investigates the development of two Korean stance markers: the “conceding marker” (pro-verb ‘do’+nominalizer focus ) and the now-obsolete “rejecting marker” ( repeating an earlier verb whose proposition it rejects++). How these two cognate forms sharing nominalizer and focus ended up encoding two opposite meanings has not been explored. This study demonstrates that focus can evoke two opposite scalar implicatures, “the most likely one” in scale-preserving contexts and “the least likely one” in scale-reversing contexts (e.g., negative or interrogative sentences), and suggests that the former implicature prompted the development of conceding , while the latter prompted that of rejecting . The study further proposes that focus shares features with topic marker , which similarly participated in the coinage of two stance markers, conceding and rejecting .

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2025-08-01
2026-05-09

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Two opposite implicatures of a focus particle
John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.24043.kim
/content/journals/10.1075/sl.24043.kim
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: grammaticalization ; focus marker ; scalar implicature ; intersubjectification ; scale reversal ; topic marker ; stance marker ; Korean

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