Evidentials and Epistemic Modal in Korean: Evidence from Their Intractions

Evidentials and Epistemic Modal in Korean -Evidence from their interactions* Keywords: evidential, direct, inferential, epistemic modal, reportative. Chungmin Lee Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University Seoul 151-742, Korea clee@snu.ac.kr Abstract. Recently J. Lee (2010) made the distinction clear about the evidential –te in Korean between inferential evidential reading with PAST and direct evidential reading with PRES in tense. She offers a modal analysis of this typologically interesting evidential. I argue here that this evidential category, though with some modal force, must be distinguished from an epistemic modal category of conjecture –keyss. If both elements co- occur in one sentence the certainty of the event involved certainly decreases (Pi-ka o-ass- keyss-te-ra ‘It might have rained, inferring from my observation’) because of the doubly modalized situation. But evidentials primarily show information source rather than certainty/truth of propositions. The perceiver of sensory (visual) observation involved in the evidential –te sentence is its speaker but if the –te sentence ends with the reportative evidential –tay, then the perceiver is not equal to the speaker. Subject constraints and interactions are examined. If –te occurs in a non-final clause ending with the sequential/causal connective –(u)ni, the PRES clause denotes sequential relation with the third person subject, whereas the PAST clause denotes causal relation based on the internalized inferential result-experience as cause and the resulting consequence in the final clause with the first (and often third, but not second) person subject. * This research was partly supported by KRF-2009-342A00017 (Excellent Scholar Grant). I thank my colleagues and family for assistance in the grammaticality judgments of evidential sentences. Copyright 2010 by Chungmin Lee 1 Introduction Recently the observational evidential –te in Korean became a hot issue particularly when J. Lee (2010) made the distinction clear between inferential evidential reading with PAST and direct evidential reading with PRES in tense. She offers a modal analysis of this typologically interesting evidential, on the basis of modal subordination evidence. But here I argue that this evidential category must be distinguished from an epistemic modal category of conjecture –keyss and of certainty thulim-eps-i ‘certainly’ (or thulim-eps- ‘certain’). The perceiver of sensory and psychological observation involved (senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, weight and feelings of dizziness, etc.) in the evidential –te sentence is the speaker of the sentence. If the –te sentence ends with the reportative evidential –tay/-ray, however, the perceiver switches to the report source, not the speaker of the whole utterance. Strikingly, if the same –te co-occurs with the sequential/causal connective –(u)ni, the so- called non-equi subject constraint breaks down and the first person is required with PAST. The talk thus addresses various interactional aspects of –te with epistemic modal, with reportative evidential, and with a sequential/causal connective. PACLIC 24 Proceedings 193 2 The Direct/Inferential –te and the Epistemic Modal –kess The observational evidential –te denotes the speaker’s prior sensory, typically visual, observation of the event described if the event is without PAST, as follows: (1) Pi-ka o-te-ra rain-NOM come- te-DEC ‘[I saw] it was raining.’ As in (1), …

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