Appearances Are Deceiving: Polysemization and Grammaticalization of Korean and Thai Lexemes of Chinese Origin

Abstract

From crosslinguistic and grammaticalization perspectives, uniquely valuable insights into the role of conceptual and cognitive operations in language change can be obtained when observing myriad developmental patterns of lexemes in multiple languages which originated from the same etymon in a donor language. These historical borrowings undergo diverse changes within a language, often independent of the characteristics in the donor language. While Korean and Thai are typologically distinct and genealogically unrelated, both have been extensively influenced by Chinese in historical times, albeit with little or no documentation at the time of borrowing. This paper addresses the polysemization and grammaticalization of the two lexemes yang in Korean and yàaŋ in Thai, whose etymon is the Chinese yàng ‘appearance, shape, etc.’ In the recipient languages, a number of lexical meanings were borrowed or innovated, with different foci in each instance. The lexemes were also grammaticalized into a prefix, preposition, conjunction, modality markers for probability and false similarity (counterfactual), and a similative denoting ‘like’. A notable aspect is that Korean yang and Thai yàaŋ, unlike their Chinese etymon yàng, developed into markers of false resemblance, i.e., counterfactuals. This paper shows the influence of the morphosyntactic characteristics of the recipient languages on grammaticalization processes.