Various Evidentials in Korean

VARIOUS EVIDENTIALS in KOREAN  Kyung-An Song Department of German, Chonnam National Univeristy, 77 Yongbong-ro, Buk-gu,Gwangju, Korea kasong@chonnam.ac.kr Abstract. Evidentiality is one of the important issues in the recent studies of linguistic typology whereby the Korean evidentials are not so much talked about. In Korean the evidentiality is not so systematically represented as other grammatical categories such as tense or honorifics. But it does have some means for evidential expression. The past retrospective ending -deo- has this function. And the 'say' verb malhada underwent many kinds of formal reduction and contraction to develop various report/hearsay evidential markers which are very frequently used in colloquial speech. The 'see' verb boda expresses also the evidential meaning in the biclausal structure or as an auxiliary. Besides we have some other auxiliaries for this purpose. We propose two simple tests to distinguish the modal and evidential auxiliaries. Keywords: Evidential, Modality, Report, Information Source, Grammaticalization  This is a slightly revised version of my paper "Song, K.-A.(2009), Evidentials in Korean. Eoneohag (The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal) 17:2, 1-20." I would like to thank Professor Chungmin Lee who organized the post-conference workshop of PACLIC 2010 and invited me to present this paper. Copyright 2010 by Kyung-An Song 1 Introduction Evidentiality is a grammatical category which deals with the source a speaker has for his or her statement, whether he/she saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence. In some languages it is obligatory in every sentence, and there are also languages in which it is an optional category (Jacobsen, 1986; Aikhenvald, 2003a; Aikhenvald, 2004). According to Aikhenvald (2004: 1), about a quarter of world's langauges have obligatory evidentiality systems. Evidentiality has been typically considered as one of the subcategories of modality (Palmer, 1985/2002; Willett, 1988; Frawley, 1992; Bybee et al. 1994). But recently some linguists are of the position that the two are separate categories (Bernd Heine, p.c., Aikhenvald, 2003a; de Haan, 2001, 2005; see also Nuyts, 2006: 2, de Haan, 2006: 57ff). This paper will take the second position and try to differentiate the two categories in Korean. Since Chafe & Nichols (eds.) (1986) evidentiality has been one of the important issues in the recent studies of linguistic typology (cf. Johanson & Utas (eds.), 2000; Aikhenvald & Dixon (eds.), 2003; Aikhenvald, 2004). The Korean evidentials are thereby not so much talked about, although we observe some interesting phenomena in this language. Jae-mog Song (2002) might be the first attempt on the topic. It is concerned with the verbal ending -deo-, a visual evidential marker. In Korean we find some further meaningful evidential markers. This paper explores the evidential markers/expressions in Korean in general to contribute to the typological discussions in this area. 2 The evidential ending -deo /-deon/-deoni PACLIC 24 Proceedings 895 Among Korean grammarians the ending -deo- is traditionally categorized as a past retrospective marker (cf. Hyun-Bae Choi, 1937; Ung Heo, 1987) or a mood or aspect marker (cf. Ho-min Sohn, 1975; Hyo-Sang Lee, 1991). Recently it is analyzed as …

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