Abstract
It has been discussed that there is a close relationship between sentence ending particles and clause types in
Korean. In this paper, I focus on the cases where we find interesting pairings between the form and the function. Specifically,
the constructions that I investigate have a form of interrogative while they have the illocutionary force of exclaiming. After
discussing their syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties, I characterize them as wh-marked polar interrogatives in Korean.
These wh-marked polar interrogatives are used to express surprise or unexpectedness of the speaker towards the prior assertion or
listener’s belief in the context. Due to the presence of a wh-word, the sentence expresses the speaker’s judgment that p
<likely ¬p.
Abstract
It has been discussed that there is a close relationship between sentence ending particles and clause types in Korean. In this paper, I focus on the cases where we find interesting pairings between the form and the function. Specifically, the constructions that I investigate have a form of interrogative while they have the illocutionary force of exclaiming. After discussing their syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties, I characterize them as wh-marked polar interrogatives in Korean. These wh-marked polar interrogatives are used to express surprise or unexpectedness of the speaker towards the prior assertion or listener’s belief in the context. Due to the presence of a wh-word, the sentence expresses the speaker’s judgment that p <likely ¬p.
© 2026 John Benjamins Publishing Company
Available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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2026-07-10
2026-07-19
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