Korean evidentials in discourse

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2012-05

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Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is a study of Korean evidentiality on the basis of presuppositional analysis. My claim is that Korean evidentiality can be accounted for under the binding theory of presupposition (Asher & Lascarides 1998; 2003; Asher 2000). The proposal I motivate in this dissertation is that interpretations of Korean evidentials can be handled using the same mechanism which resolves anaphoric expressions.Dynamic Semantics such as DRT and SDRT give a contribution to account for phenomena like anaphora bridging, presupposition, and accomodation bythe update procedure of the discourse structure. I investigate Korean evidentials by examining their distributions and functions in Korean grammar and specifying the types of information source in Korean evidential system. In particular,there are three evidential types in Korean: Direct te, Reportative tay, Inference ci. I propose that the Korean evidential system corresponds to B-1 system in Aikhenvald (2004). I also give an analysis of the intonation phrase of utterances featuring Korean evidentials with the autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology. Moreover, I argue that Korean evidentials are presupposition triggers. To verify my claim, I provide various tests such as negation, challengeability and the interrogative flip. All the tests support for classifying Korean evidentials as one category. I also review and compare three different theoretical frameworks: modal, illocutionary and presuppositional analysis. I reject a modal analysis and an illocutionary analysis and employ a presuppositional analysis for Korean evidentiality.I propose that Korean evidentiality can be explained in terms of SDRT(Asher & Lascarides 1998; 2003). Asher & Lascarides (1998) regard presupposition resolution as an integrated part of the task of building discourse relations. I also show that the speaker-dependency of evidentiality is explicitly associated with characteristics of indexicals. Just as in the line of work stemming from Hunter & Asher (2005), I demonstrated that Korean evidentials are anaphorically resolved by the extra-linguistic context as well as by the linguistic context.

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