Evidentials and Epistemic Modal in Korean: Evidence from Their Intractions

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 cooccur in one sentence the certainty of the event involved certainly decreases (Pi-ka o-asskeyss-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