Revisiting Korean long form negative question : A usage-based perspective

Unlike most of the previous work on the semantic/functional ambiguity of the long form negative question construction in Korean which mainly focused on its terminology and classification, this present paper aims to revisit the issue from a strictly usage-based perspective. To do so, this study examines actual usages of the long form negative question from naturally occurring conversational data, collected from the 21st Century Sejong Corpus. My findings show that in Modern Spoken Korean, the construction is used for three different main functions: (i) to ask the hearer whether what the speaker assumes to be not true is true or not, (ii) to request the hearer’s verification or confirmation of what the speaker assumes to be true, and (iii) to request agreement from the hearer about what the speaker assumes to be true. However, the corpus data analysis further shows that there are ambiguous cases of functional overlap among these three different functions. In this paper, I argue that these overlapping cases provide evidence that the three different functions have a gradient speech act continuum. Moreover, I claim that the synchronic functional ambiguity of the construction not only indicates that it is currently undergoing a functional shift, but the frequency analysis of each function and the categories that overlap further provide evidence for the direction of the construction’s current semantic/functional shift. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)