Formation and development of mood markers in the Korean language

The article explores the process of formation and establishment of the main markers of mood category in the Korean language. The mood category in the Korean language is marked. The historical uniqueness of the Korean language mood system is characterized by a simplification of the suffixes and a reorientation of their meaning from modal-temporal to modal. The paper analyzes the process of formation of mood markers and retraces the influence of other modal and aspectual forms on the formation and changings in their meanings and functions. The author describes the changes of the mood markers between the medieval and contemporary periods. It is well known that language has its own mood system which is historically changeable. The grammatical mood conveys the speaker’s attitude about the state of being of what the sentence describes. In Korean the mood markers are used in a predicates position, as a rule. The meaning of moods in modern Korean can be expressed with suffixes and analytical forms as well. However in medieval Korean (XV-XVI) one suffix could include several grammar meanings. Tense, aspect and modality interacted very closely with each other in realization of syntactic and morphological forms. So aspectual, temporal and modal meanings could be expressed in one grammar form. Those suffixes matched with definite final, attributive and conjunctive forms. But the situations had changed during the contemporary period of Korean language. During the contemporary period, the grammar system was simplified. Aspectual and temporal markers became independent, and mood markers were included into the final endings. The author describes in detail the peculiarities of the evidentiality, indicative, resultative, suppositive, expressive (admirativ), and apodictive markers in a diachronic aspect. The author analyses in detail the functioning, main meanings, specific character of main marker usage of the indicative mood suffix -nă-; the marker of evidentiality -to-; apodictive -ni-; expressive (admirativ) -tos-; suppositive -li-; resultative -ko-. The main attention in the research is put on the combination with temporal suffixes, sentence markers using limitation; varieties of predicates compatibility. The author makes a conclusion that some suffixes (-to-, -ko-, -nă-) were multifunctional and had modal, aspectual and temporal meaning, but such marker as -ni- and -li- were expressed only modal meaning. During the XV-XIX centuries the number of mood suffixes and their allomorphs decreased and most of them lost their meaning and were included in final endings.