From quotation to surprise: The case in Korean

Korean has a number of sentence-final particles that mark mirativity at variable degrees. We address the development of one representative form -tani, which has undergone a series of grammaticalization processes, e.g., complementation and insubordination. As it inherited the complementizer function, i.e., introducing a second-hand information, it carried the overtone of surprise, since quotative and reportative are often recruited to present noteworthy information. In Modern Korean, as the marker -tani became a fully established mirative, its function began to depart from its source function of reporting other-authored information, to encompass that of marking self-authored information as well. Since language users exploit grammatical markers for strategic reasons in discourse, the functions of -tani further extended to diverse speech-act marking roles, including feigned surprise, emphasis, news-breaking, challenge, etc. We propose that the emergence of mirative is motivated by three factors, i.e., the source effect, the main-clause ellipsis effect, and the peripheral position effect. Since many sentence-final particles share these characteristics, mirativity marking is not monopolized by a single form, such as -tani, but is shared by a group of markers (the -tani family sentence-final particles), which exhibits diverse epistemic and attitudinal stances that are closely related to the grammatical notion of mirativity.