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This paper addresses some politeness strategies adopted by the speakers of Korean, which are grammaticalizing into modality markers encoding the speaker's stance about the proposition being presented. The attenuatives, recruiting lexical items denoting ‘shape' ‘be equal' ‘be same' ‘see' ‘want' and ‘not know', develop into a marker of politeness through conjectural meanings. In the grammaticalization process diverse strategies are employed: (a) the speakers resort to speaker-external phenomenon or uncontrollable mental state, thus avoiding presenting themselves as responsible for such judgment; (b) the sentential subjects do not agree with the sentential predicate, thus subjecting the sentence to reanalysis whereby the sentential predicates are now reanalyzed as modality markers; and (c) the true sentential subjects or other crucial arguments are omitted to make the sentential argument structure vague. All these are consequences of the common strategy in a language community where direct mention of the sentential elements is often avoided for politeness reasons.
