Jeong, Hyeongseok. 2018. “Discursive Functions of the Free Morpheme ish1)”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(2). 37~62. This study aims to explore the corpus data of the free morpheme ish with special reference to its discursive functions. Derived from suffix -ish, ish develops as a free morpheme denoting a sense of approximation. On its way to broadening its functions, ish not only approximates the propositional meaning, but also hedges the speaker's attitude towards the proposition. The semantics of ish indicates that the degree is slightly below the standard, but data show that this is not always the case. Contextual factors play a part in determining the degree of ish. By thoroughly analyzing data from the corpora, I focus on the functions of the ish in the discourse level, and the role of the surrounding context in differing scale of the free morpheme ish. Moreover, I introduce the punctuation marks occurring with the use of ish in written examples by focusing on the characteristics of each punctuation mark.

Abstract
 1. Introduction
 2. Theoretical Background: Characteristics of the suffix -ish and the previous studies
 3. Data
 4. Findings: Discursive functions of ish
  4.1 What does ish take? a word, a phrase, or the entire sentence?
  4.2 Stand-alone ish
  4.3 ish with punctuation mark
  4.4. The role of context and the semantic scale of ish
 5. Conclusion
 References

• Hyeongseok Jeong(Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)