“I will do it… but I’m Asking you to do it”: On the Emergence of Polite Imperative from Promissive

The Korean language has a rich inventory of sentence-final particles encoding diverse grammatical notions including sentence types and the speaker's subjective and intersubjective stances. A new imperative marker is under active development in Present- Day Korean largely motivated by discourse politeness. This emergent marker is identical in form with the promissive marker, which signals the speaker's commitment to fulfill something for the benefit of the addressee. An analysis of the grammaticalization process involved in the functional shift reveals diverse mechanisms of morpho-syntactic and semantic changes as well as discourse politeness strategies to mitigate the face-threatening illocutionary force of commanding.