“I Know I’m Shameless to Say this”: Grammaticalization of the Mitigating Discourse Marker Makilay in Korean

Discourse markers are universal especially in oral discourse. Korean has one peculiar type of mitigating discourse markers that came into existence recently and is widely used among the young generation, i.e. makilay and its variants. An analysis of their grammaticalization processes reveals that they involve (i) meta-discursive strategies in that the speaker is monitoring the self's utterances, (ii) a shifted perspective in that an imaginary third-person's evaluative viewpoint is adopted, and (iii) elaborate intersubjectification in that the speaker is attenuating the self's talk by protecting the face of the addressee as well as the speaker in a potentially face-threatening act.