The role of frequency and prosody in the grammaticalization of Korean -canh-

This paper investigates the role of frequency and prosody in the emergence of the new interactive marker -canh- from the committal suffix ci- plus negation verb anh- in Korean. Using a spoken recorded corpus drawn from natural discourse, this study provides empirical evidence of the role of boundary tones in grammaticalization. It shows that the source form is marked with a high boundary tone, whereas the emergent form is primarily marked with a low boundary tone. Moreover, the source and target forms exhibit a distinct pattern of collocation frequency. This study has some theoretical implications for grammaticalization studies by showing that the prosodic features and frequency may interact in the process of grammaticalization.