Negotiating common ground in discourse: a diachronic and discourse analysis of maliya in Korean

► Many languages have pragmatic cues that signal speakers' efforts to establish common ground. ► Korean, for example, makes frequent use of pragmatic marker maliya as a common ground marker. ► Maliya is used as an emphatic marker, a discourse topic marker, and a pragmatic hedger among others. ► Our study sheds light on how Korean maliya developed into a versatile common ground marker. ► The findings in this paper supports the unidirectionality of (inter) subjectivity.