| 초록 |
Oh, Hyo-Jung & Kim, Chonghyuck. (2021). Probing the origin of the Korean adverbial kay- using data from Twitter. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 29(3), 21-40. Traditionally, the word kay dog had been used as a prefix in Korean boosting the negative sense of the noun that it attaches to, as in kay-kosayng worthless extreme hardship. Around 2010, however, a morpheme, which looks exactly the same as prefix kay-, began to be used among younger generations as an adverbial expression, freely combining with various sorts of categories which have gradable meanings. This new adverbial kay has thereafter been viewed as an evolved variant of prefix kay- in the Korean literature. Recently, however, Im (2015) rejects this standard view about the origin of adverbial kay, and argues that it has nothing to do with prefix kay- as it derives from khap cap(tain) through the intermediate form khay. In this article, we probe the origin of adverbial kay using the data we collected from Twitter. Usage patterns that emerge from our analysis of the data containing khap and khay strongly indicate, contra Im (2015), (i) that khap cannot be the origin of adverbial kay and that khay can neither be its predecessor. Rather, the usage patterns match up to the expectations held by the standard view that adverbial kay originates from prefix kay. |
