한국어 증거성표지 ‘-더-’의 통사･의미

Abstract

This paper, based on the syntactic analysis of the evidential –te- constructions in Korean, proposes that –te- marks direct perceptive evidentiality for the statement, which is syntactically defined as the complement of the functional category –te-, contra the claim that it marks both direct and inferrential evidentiality or indirect evidentiality for eventuality (Lee 2013; Lim 2021). Our proposal, hopefully and surprisingly, enables us to find out three important characteristics of the Korean evidential –te- constructions. First, the evidentiality found in other languages, e.g., visual, inferring, hearsay, etc. is realized through appropriate functional categories internally in the statement. Second, the so-called tense marker –ess and –keyss, on which Lee(2013) develops her theory, may not be tense markers but only function as modals for completion and conjecture, respectively. Third, the same evidence can be interpreted differently for its credibility and each speaker expresses this subjective interpretation in terms of different functional categories internally in the statement. One of the theoretical implications that our analysis may bring about is that the above-mentioned diverse kinds of evidentiality (Aikhenvald 2006) might be only apparent: Evidentiality would be universal and the mode of its execution would only be different in that some languages employ different verbal morphology as in Tariana and others like Korean separate evidentiality from epistemic modals and hearsay.