On the emergence of Korean markers of agreement

•This paper analyzes grammaticalization of discourse markers of agreement (DMAs).•DMAs originate from conditionals, quotatives and causals.•DMAs develop from elliptical structures through pragmatic inferences.•Anaphoric expressions play a crucial role in pragmatic inferencing.•DMAs develop from intersubjectification on defective discourse segments.

This paper discusses the emergence of some of the discourse markers of agreement (DMAs) in Korean. This paper shows the processes that DMAs have historically undergone en route to their grammaticalization into discourse markers. The DMAs under discussion originated from three different sources: conditionals, quotations, and causals. The development of these DMAs involves the strategic use of ellipsis. By way of strategically withholding the main clause, the speaker indicates that the situation is so obvious that the elided part does not require explicit utterance. This is a common strategy in Korean utilized in the development of connectives into sentence-final particles that acquired diverse meanings through conventionalization of pragmatic inferences. These DMAs also recruited the anaphoric kule- ‘be so’ that makes reference to the speaker's prior utterance and becomes a part of a conditional or causal protasis or a subordinated quotative clause. This paper also shows that the development of these DMAs crucially makes use of intersubjectification through which the elided parts are pragmatically reconstructed and the residual ‘defective’ (i.e. partially elided and phonologically reduced) discourse segments become full-fledged DMAs.