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A critique of recent formal semantic descriptions of ‘-teo -’ in Korean

  • Korean Semantics
  • 2020, 69(), pp.155-195
  • DOI : 10.19033/sks.2020.9.69.155
  • Publisher : The Society Of Korean Semantics
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature
  • Received : August 20, 2020
  • Accepted : September 18, 2020
  • Published : September 30, 2020

JEONG-SEOK Yang 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

I argue that the inflectional element ‘-teo-’ in Korean is an element essentially representing a modal meaning, rather than a marker for tense or a marker solely for evidentiality, and show that its semantic description contains an intensional function in terms of Kratzer’s(1981,1991) formal semantic theory of modality, and a definedness condition on the existence of the direct evidence about the preceding proposition. After discussing previous three different approaches, i.e., tense based, solely modal based, and solely evidential based ones, I show that my definition combining the modality and the presupposition of direct evidence enables capturing the various semantic constraints of ‘-teo-’ sentences. In particular, I show that there is a general semantic requirement of an epistemic modal element on the judge dependent elements and this requirement triggers to resolve the so-called 1st person restriction of ‘-teo-’ sentences.

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