Contemporary Korean has a number of forms that make the future time reference. Their grammatical statuses are variable, e.g., an adnominalizing suffix, modal auxiliary, sentence-ender, etc. Unlike the cross-linguistically attested patterns, Korean futures involve two grammatical formants that inherently involve futurity, i.e., suffixes indicating '(at) a later time' and 'mode, manner, purpose', which are primarily responsible for the emergence of future markers. In structural terms, the omissibility of sentential arguments and agglutinating morphology play an important role, because they make the grammatical status of a construction undergoing grammaticalization ambiguous and consequently promotes functional reinterpretation and structural reanalysis. A review of grammaticalization scenarios with respect to the grammaticalization parameters shows that grammaticalized future markers exhibit variable degrees of conformity to them.
Publication Date: 2026-06-04