Negation-Based Avoidives in Korean: Sources, Development, and Uses

Avoidives as a subcategory of apprehensionals constitute the set of grammatical means used for precautioning the hearer against probable and undesirable events. Korean avoidives have developed, and are developing, from multiple sources, such as markers of negation, purpose, mode, question, and lexical expressions of perception and cogitation. Prominent among these is negation, i.e., the avoidives involving negative morphemes an 'do/be not', mos 'cannot', and the verb mal-'stop', a state of affairs aligning with crosslinguistic patterns. There are six such avoidives and this paper addresses these negation-based avoidives, which developed from negative purpose constructions, commonly used in such speech acts as imperatives, warnings, threats, and negative commands. It also addresses the development of admonitives through insubordination, whereby a connective is turned into a sentence-ender, in which pragmatically inferred meanings become semanticized and conventionalized. A quantitative analysis reveals that the negation-sourced avoidives carry varying levels of lexical strength.