Repetition is widely attested across languages and occurs at various morphosyntactic levels. One notable class of repetition in Korean involves highly formulaic patterns of repeating a proposition, i.e., two sentences juxtaposed in succession, enveloped within a single intonation contour, as exemplified in (1) (FORM: formal; DEC: declarative; INFORM: informal; POL: polite; END: sentence-ender):
(1) A: [Come quickly! Hurry!]
B: ka-pnita ka-(a)yo.
go-FORM.DEC go-INFORM.POL.END
‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ (Lit. (I) go, (I) go.)
B’s utterance in (1) consists of two sentences (note that argument omission is relatively free in Korean). One peculiarity of this two-sentence repetition is that the two sentences must be structurally not identical, i.e., they should end with different speech level markers, the combination pattern of which is rather restrictive. This is an intriguing phenomenon considering that Korean is a rare language in which intersubjectivity/interactivity marking is strictly grammaticalized in various forms, including the sentence-enders that mark six speech levels based on the speaker-addressee relationship, and that the speech-level may not fluctuate during the course of discourse as long as the interactional context and the interlocutors remain the same. Note, however, the Formal Declarative and Informal Polite enders in (1B).
The significance of this pattern is that it constitutes a purely schematic construction. In terms of the form, the construction consists of two sentences, single intonation contour, and strictly constrained sentence-ender combination. In terms of the function, the construction has a range of stance-marking functions, e.g. emphasis, importunity, intimacy, discontent, irritation, pejoration, etc. In this context, it is noteworthy that these speaker stances are temporary from a more global discourse context, since this speech-level (lowering) adjustment is temporary (restricted to the utterance of this construction in a stretch of utterances) whereas the speech level across the speaker’s discourse is that of the first sentence. Furthermore, this kind of construction is not restricted to declaratives but is available across other sentence types, i.e., interrogative, imperative, propositive, and even exclamative. This temporary lowering of the speech level is often strategically employed in discourse.
