한국언어과학회

The objectives of this paper are to categorize the three words “그래(geurae)”, “뭐(mwo)”, and “왜(wae)” as a minor sentence, discourse marker, or ending auxiliary particle; examine corpora where those words are actually uttered; and explain the change to the three categories with grammaticalization. The previous studies of the minor sentences “그래(geurae)”, “뭐(mwo)”, and “왜(wae)” have focussed on the treatments of them as the single category of discourse marker or as the distinguished categories of interjections or discourse markers. However, this study focuses on the different statuses of grammatical categories and the processes of change of grammaticalization. As a result, the study shows that from the perspective of grammaticalization, the three minor sentences all undergo through changes into discourse markers and ultimately change into ending auxiliary particles depending on their discourse contexts.