The historical development of Korean siph- “to think” into markers of desire, inference, and similarity

Using diachronic corpus data, I investigate the historical development of the Korean psychological predicate siph- ‘to think to oneself,’ which engendered the desiderative -ko siph- ‘want to’ and -myen siphi- ‘would be great if…’; the inferential -ka siph-, -tus siph-, and -seng siph-, which all mean ‘probably’; and the connective siphi ‘similar to’ or ‘as’. Before the 15th C, the desiderative -ko siph- and the inferential -ka siph- were first grammaticalized within their usual contexts of use; additional desiderative and inferential constructions with siph- were subsequently created through replacement of one morpheme of these original constructions, modeled after existing constructions with similar functions.Cross-linguistically, markers of similarity often develop into markers of probability. However, the Korean connective siphi ‘similar to’ developed from the ‘probability’ meaning of siph-. Although it seems to defy the unidirectionality hypothesis that grammaticalization moves “from more concrete to more abstract meaning” (Traugott, 2002, ), I demonstrate that the development of siphi was influenced by analogy to the existing constructions kathi and tusi ‘similar to’. Based on Kiparsky (forthcoming), and Lehmann (2004), I propose that some cases of degrammaticalization that were influenced by analogy specific to given languages may not be legitimate counterexamples to the unidirectionality hypothesis.