From fear to grammar: The case of avoidives

Abstract

This paper addresses avoidives, the grammatical means of precautioning the hearer against probable and undesirable events, from crosslinguistic and grammaticalization perspectives. An analysis of avoidives in English and Korean shows that the two languages do not share much commonality with regard to lexical sources but that their source constructions have undergone changes characteristic of grammaticalization over time. We argue that the development of an avoidive into an apprehensive is among the cross-linguistically common channels, through insubordination, whereby the main clause of a biclausal expression becomes elided and the subordinate clause becomes the main clause, carrying the pragmatically inferred meaning from ellipsis, e.g., warning, as part of the meaning of the construction. The development from biclausal to monoclausal structure, however, is not deterministic, as evidence by the Korean scenario in the reversed direction shows. We also argue that negation and temporal are common source concepts in the grammaticalization of avoidives, and that some of the Korean lexical sources have not yet been observed across languages.