Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Linguistics

First Advisor

Stanley Dubinsky

Second Advisor

Emily Manetta

Abstract

Korean offers an unusually transparent window into how indefinite paradigms are built and reshaped over time. Two independent bases—a wh-indeterminate root (nwukwu ‘who’) and a dedicated indefinite root (amo/amwu)—combine with a small, reused set of particles (e.g. -(i)nka, -to, -(i)na) to yield a dense paradigm span- ning interrogative, existential/epistemic, polarity-sensitive, and free-choice func- tions. The system is especially revealing because it exhibits stable asymmetries and gaps (notably *amwu-inka) and because forms that are morphologically parallel do not freely alternate, but instead show persistent specialization.

This dissertation develops a usage-based, corpus-driven account of how this modern division of labour emerges. I treat change as movement and competition within a structured semantic space, combining Haspelmath-style semantic maps for indefinites with polarity-oriented models of diachrony. Empirically, I track nwukwu- and amo-/amwu- (bare and particle-marked) across three centuries of writ- ten Korean using the HISTORY corpus (1700–1890) and the YONSEI corpus (1900– 1990). Tokens are manually curated, annotated for map-based function, and an- alyzed using normalized frequencies, (segmented) logistic regression, and entry- threshold diagnostics that identify when a function becomes a stable part of a se- ries.

The results are organized along three dimensions. First, roots: bare nwukwu- expands from interrogatives into adjacent indefinite territory, while bare amwu- narrows along a polarity cline, retreating from earlier existential and free-choice uses into predominantly negative-polarity distributions anchored in strong nega- tive environments. Second, grammaticalization: wh+-(i)nka undergoes a clause- to-DP reanalysis that yields a productive epistemic indefinite series (nwukwunka), while the absence of *amwu-inka follows from the timing of available source con- figurations and from paradigm-internal niche saturation. Third, competition: in shared particle series, amwu- and nwukwu- partition the map rather than duplicate each other, with amwu-forms concentrating in stronger negative and indiscrimina- tive zones and nwukwu-forms occupying more neutral and extensional zones.

In sum, these findings argue that Korean indefinites are best explained at the level of the paradigm: usage-driven reweighting of functions, clause-to-DP gram- maticalization, and competition jointly produce the modern system, and they do so in ways that largely respect semantic-map adjacency.

Rights

© 2026, Rok Sim

Download

Included in

Linguistics Commons

Share

COinS