Rhetorical questions as catalyst in grammaticalization: Deriving Korean discourse marker KETUN from conditional connective Alan Hyun-Oak Kim * Departments of Foreign Langs & Lits/Linguistics, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale IL 62901-4521/National Institute of Japanese and Linguistics, Tachikawa, Tokyo 190-8561, Japan 1. Introduction Korean has two typical conditional connectives: -myen and -ketun, equivalent to if, when, provided that ... in English. 1 In comparison to the myen conditional, the ketun conditional is somewhat skewed in distribution: it occurs only in interactional environments such as imperative and hortative. 2 Ketun, unlike its sister conditional myen, also appears at the sentence- terminal position uniquely functioning as a discourse marker. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1023–1041 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 19 June 2008 Received in revised form 1 October 2010 Accepted 5 October 2010 Available online 3 December 2010 Keywords: Rhetorical question Catalyst Grammaticalization Discourse marker Conditional connective Authenticative marker Conditionality Hypotheticality Protasis Apodosis Factivity Quasi-factivity Stranded construct Performative function Subjectification Intersubjectification Implicature Speech act Evidential Retrospective past ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with a lexical item ketun, which has two functions in Modern Korean: as a conditional connective and as a sentence-terminal discourse marker. The discourse marker is typically found when the speaker clarifies, makes excuses, apologizes, provides background information, mitigates illocutionary forces, or redresses face- threatening acts (FTAs) à la Brown and Levinson, 1987. Despite its apparent direct connection, the character of the functional shift of ketun from a conjunction to a discourse marker is not immediately clear. To date, there is no satisfactory analysis of the grammaticalization processes involved. The chief reason for this seems to lie in the technical difficulty in describing the discourse marker; ketun is represented in a wide range of functional variations. Because of such functional multiplicity, the discourse marker ketun is often described in a diffuse manner, as the ‘explicative’ ketun, the ‘apologetic’ ketun, the ‘redressive’ ketun, the ‘background-laying’ ketun, and the like. The purpose of the present thesis is to provide a principled account of the discourse marker ketun by characterizing it as the ‘authenticative’ marker. This approach allows the essential function of the authenticative discourse marker ketun to be captured and reveals how ketun serves as an effective discourse marker. This paper also shows that the sentence-terminal discourse marker is a direct descendant of the ketun antecedent associated with rhetorical questions, which plays an intriguing catalyst role in the grammaticalization process. ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: alanhkim@siu.edu. 1 Sohn (1999:307) lists three items as subordinate conjunctive suffixes of conditional: -e.ya/a.ya ‘only if,’ -kentay ‘when, if,’ -taka-nun ‘if keep doing or being,’ besides -myen and -ketun. Martin (1992:329) gives a list of twelve Korean morphemes as the English equivalents if/when, which includes -umyen/-myen/-ketun. 2 Strictly speaking, the underlying form of the conditional connective myen should be -u-myen with the irrealis marker /u/. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.001