On Korean Adverbs Licensed by Metalinguistic Negation

Abstract

Korean adverbs like yekan, pothong, and com, traditionally known as negative polarity items (NPIs), have recently been denied of their status as NPIs and argued to be licensed by metalinguistic negation (MN). However, little attention has been paid to the exact relation between the three adverbs and MN, although it is necessary to deeply understand semantic/pragmatic properties of those words. The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of these words by exploring how they interact with various linguistic phenomena related to MN. Particularly, another Korean adverb kunyang is also discussed. The two main arguments of the paper are that 1) the four adverbs behave not uniformly but differently with respect to MN, particularly regarding how much they have been fossilized to have emphatic positive meaning and what types of negative expressions they go along with and 2) com is the most prototypical adverb licensed by MN, and the order of prototypicality is kunyang, pothong, and yekan, which contradicts previous analyses that take pothong and yekan to be the exemplar cases of adverbs licensed by MN.