On the Rise of Nominalizers in Korean: Grammaticalization of Cikyeng ‘Boundary’ and Yang ‘Shape’

Korean is a dynamic language which exhibits the development of a variety of lexical nouns into grammatical markers. Among the many examples in the Korean language, some forms such as cikyeng ‘boundary’ and yang ‘shape’ show intriguing functional- semantic extension patterns. In other words, the items originally used as free morphemes, functioning main components in sentences and encoding physical space or situations, became stance markers – a negative function in present-day Korean. In this respect, this paper attempts to investigate the historical evolution of the lexical nouns cikyeng and yang from a grammaticalization perspective. As full-fledged nouns, the items show diverse semantic-functional characteristics in present-day Korean as lexical nouns, defective/light nouns, and nominalizers in reference to negative markers. Considering the diversity of each single form as a result of the historical pragmatics and cognitive activities, this paper focuses on the analysis of the semantic-functional change that cikyeng and yang undergone over time and the semantic extension patterns triggered by cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor, metonymy and subjectification. To examine the diverse paths and the semantic development shown in the items, this paper suggests grammaticalization process that is largely enabled by the conceptual mechanisms along the image schema, and presents an explication of how negative marking functions emerge from spatial and situational concepts based on the cognitive forces that operate in language use.