A Corpus-Pragmatic Analysis of Wuli
Hye-Kyung Lee · Discourse and Cognition · 2015
This paper is a corpus-based approach to the uses of the Korean first person plural pronoun wuli. Moving away from the intuitive research which used made-up data, this paper explores the use of wuli using corpus data. One major finding of this paper is that the pronoun wuli can be employed for a wider variety of non-deictic/non-indexical purposes than previously investigated, providing the evidence against the ‘essential indexical thesis’. This study also reveals that wuli conforms to a cross-linguistic tendency in which first person plural pronouns are used for first person singular references. When deployed for a singular reference, alongside some other uses, wuli is argued to function as a stance marker expressing the speaker’s affectionate attitude.