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The meaning of ‘relevance’: Korean native speakers’ acceptance judgment and interpretation of relevance conditionals.

  • Korean Semantics
  • 2022, 76(), pp.134-164
  • Publisher : The Society Of Korean Semantics
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature
  • Received : April 30, 2022
  • Accepted : June 13, 2022
  • Published : June 30, 2022

Park, Yugyeong 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper mainly aims to investigate the interpretation of relevance conditionals in Korean. To this end, an acceptability judgment test was conducted on Korean native speakers, and the results show that Korean speakers accept relevance conditionals only when the consequent clause provides relevant information with respect to the action-relevant decision problem derived from the antecedent clause. Given this finding, this paper suggests the interpretation of Korean relevance conditionals based on the Kratzerian interpretation method of ordinary indicative conditionals with some modifications for Korean relevance conditionals. Under the current analysis, it is assumed that the antecedent clause functions as a restrictor of a modal base, just like ordinary conditional clauses. Also, it is claimed that a (potential) action-relevant decision problem is derived from the antecedent clause, and as a result, the addressee’s desire to solve the decision problem by deciding which action should be performed ranks at the top of the addressee’s effective preference; then the consequent clause provides information that helps the addressee to choose the best action among the possible actions that compose the decision problem.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.