ABSTRACT
The repeated use of expressives in general gives rise to a strengthening effect referred to as repeatability (Potts 2007). The notion of repeatability, however, requires further scrutiny. Unlike other formality-denoting expressives, medial yos in Korean show an uncommon pattern of behavior: the more yos you have, the less sense of formality you get. Adopting many of the concepts introduced in Potts (2005, 2007) and McCready (2019), I offer a formal analysis on how a repeated use of an expressive can weaken the expressive content. Further, medial yos can only be realized in the presence of another formality marker, such as (su)pni. The findings of this work suggest that there are predictable restrictions on expressives which have largely been understudied in the literature. Specifically, I argue that medial yos are underspecified in terms of their expressive content and that they are dependent on a fully specified expressive elsewhere in the derivation.
