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Part of
Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems
Edited by Sara Lenninger, Olga Fischer, Christina Ljungberg and Elżbieta Tabakowska
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 18] 2022
► pp. 369–388

The phonosemantics of the Korean monosyllabic ideophone ttak

ORCID logo | Nagoya University

The aim of this study is to show how the Korean monosyllabic ideophone ttak functions in spoken register. Ttak is the most frequent ideophone in Korean everyday conversation. Using a spoken corpus, it is proposed that (i) ttak functions as an epistemic modality marker that expresses certainty and the speaker’s belief or confidence in the truth-value of the proposition; (ii) the meaning of certainty is based on language-specific and universal form-meaning correspondences; (iii) there is a correlation between the epistemic marker ttak and its morphosyntactic integration.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Monosyllabic ideophones in Korean
    • 2.1Morphology
    • 2.2Phonology
      • 2.2.1Initial consonants
      • 2.2.2Vowels
      • 2.2.3Final consonants
    • 2.3Epistemic modality
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Epistemic modality marker ttak
  • 5.The form-meaning mappings in epistemic ttak
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • The abbreviations and symbols used in this paper are as follows
  • References
  • Corpus
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.18.17par
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Corpus

Sejong Corpus
National Institute of Korean Language Republic of Korea. Seoul, South Korea.