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Article published In: Studies in Language
Vol. 40:4 (2016) ► pp.872–893

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Emotion in interaction

A diachronic and pragmatic analysis of the sentence-final particle -tani in Korean

 | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
Published online: 2 February 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.40.4.04ahn
The present paper investigates how the Korean sentence-final particle -tani is used to mark mirativity. More interestingly, this paper discusses how Korean speakers or writers employ this mirative marker -tani (i) to often express their negative emotions and satisfy their face needs and (ii) to elicit the reader’s engagement, using data from the Sejong Contemporary Spoken and Written Corpus. This paper also examines the development of -tani: The non-subjective complementations, in this case involving constructions with the quotative -tani, come to be reinterpreted as subjective constructions with sentence-final -tani, syntactically and pragmatically reanalyzed as a mirative marker. In addition, the findings from this study have broader theoretical and cross-linguistic implications for the existence of mirativity as distinct from evidentiality and the interaction of mirativity with the expression of emotional attitudes (see DeLancey 2001, 2012).
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