The Korean evidential –te: A modal analysis

Evidentiality is a linguistic category that specifies the source of information conveyed in an utterance (Aikhenvald and Dixon 2003), such as direct observation, inference, or hearsay. According to Aikhenvald’s (2004) cross-linguistic study of over 500 languages, a typologically common pattern is to specify distinct sources of information with distinct morphemes, such as Quechua’s three evidentials: –mi (for direct observation), –chá (for inferential evidence), and –si (for hearsay evidence). Previous formal analyses of evidentiality have focused on such typologically common evidential systems (e.g. Quechua in Faller 2002, St’át’imcets in Matthewson et al. 2008). TheKorean evidential systemprovides a novel perspective for cross-linguistic studies on evidentiality. There are no independent markers specifying distinct sources of information in Korean. But the Korean evidential –te appears to give rise to various evidential readings depending on which tense it occurs with. This is illustrated in (1). The evidential readings are represented in square brackets: