Grammaticalization and Lexicalization of Rhetorical Questions in Korean

Discourse is where linguistic forms are subjected to semantic and grammatical changes through meaning negotiation between interlocuters. This paper aims to describe emergence of various grammatical items from one of discourse strategies, i.e. rhetorical questions. It shows that certain rhetorical questions are grammaticalized into various grammatical markers, and sometimes into lexical items. It claims that some of these developments exhibit the reversal of intersubjectification by losing their capabilities of directly reflecting the speaker-addressee relationship; that grammaticalization and lexicalization are not entirely discrete processes but intertwined, each even making use of certain identical processes; and that grammar and lexicon, rather than being two separate entities, form a continuum.