On Korean Adverbs Licensed by Metalinguistic Negation

초록

Korean adverbs like yekan, pothong, and com, traditionally known asnegative polarity items (NPIs), have recently been denied of their statusas NPIs and argued to be licensed by metalinguistic negation (MN). However, little attention has been paid to the exact relation betweenthe three adverbs and MN, although it is necessary to deeply understandsemantic/pragmatic properties of those words. The purpose ofthis paper is to provide a deeper understanding of these words by exploringhow they interact with various linguistic phenomena related toMN. Particularly, another Korean adverb kunyang is also discussed. The two main arguments of the paper are that 1) the four adverbs behavenot uniformly but differently with respect to MN, particularly regardinghow much they have been fossilized to have emphatic positivemeaning and what types of negative expressions they go along withand 2) com is the most prototypical adverb licensed by MN, and theorder of prototypicality is kunyang, pothong, and yekan, which contradictsprevious analyses that take pothong and yekan to be the exemplarcases of adverbs licensed by MN.

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