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A grammatical category of ‘-teo-’ in modern Korean - focusing on ‘-Teola’

  • Korean Semantics
  • 2013, 40(), pp.71-110
  • Publisher : The Society Of Korean Semantics
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature

SONHYEOK 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that ‘-teo-’ in ‘-teola’ is both a tense marker and an evidential modality marker. ‘-teo-’ has a evidential modality meaning indicating that a preceding proposition to ‘-teo-' is a speaker's a cognition through a direct sensory experience. And ‘-teo-’ also indicates the past time point when the speaker acquired the information(the cognition, the proposition). Although the time ‘-teo-’ indicates is a cognition time, ‘-teo-’ can be considerd as tense. Because the time reference of ‘-teo-’ corresponds with the definition of tense, which is a grammaticalized expression of location in time, A view of including a location of cognition time in time line in tense can give us a good explanation about ‘-eoss’ that can scope over epistemic modality construction. Many previous literature considerd ‘-teo-’as either a tense marker or a modality marker, and they accounted the another categorical characteristics to the derived meaning or a function from the categorical characteristics which they considered. But if we classify ‘-teo-’ as only a modality marker, we can not explain the imperfective aspectual meaning of ‘-teo-’ and if we classify ‘-teo-’ as only a tense marker, we can not explain why the proposition is the cognition through the speaker's direct sensory. Therefore considering ‘-teo-’ as a morpheme combining information about evidential modality and tense gives us a good explanation of ‘-teo’. Across languages evidential modality markers often have the function to indicate the time the speaker get the information, which is related with the diachronic change. ‘-Teo’ is one of this kind of evidentail modality makers.

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