Chapter 13. Grammaticalization of space in Korean and Japanese

Heiko Narrog | Tohoku University

Seongha Rhee | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

Spatial concepts are central for human language and cognition. They can either be the source or the target of grammaticalizations. In this paper, we compare grammaticalization in Japanese and Korean in four core areas related to space: case particles and related particles, relational nouns, postpositional verbs, and demonstratives. While the two languages are so well-studied that it would be unrealistic to expect any genuinely new findings through such a limited comparison, the area studied here yields a probably fairly representative window on the two languages, which is characterized by the following features: striking similarities in the structure of the grammaticalizations, most likely due to common (genetic or areal) inheritance, and little overlap in the lexical sources, except for core expressions that may represent a particularly old layer.

Published online: 28 February 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.132.21nar