Multiple Marking of Evidentials in Korean

한국어 증거성표지의 중복실현

This paper investigates multiple marking of evidentials in Korean. Korean has 4 evidential markers: Present Sensory -ney, Past Sensory -te-, Inference -keyss-, Reported -ay. Korean allows evidential marked more than once in the same clause. Not all the possible combinations of evidential markers are, however, observed in Korean. Only five combinations of evidential markers are allowed: Inference followed by Past Sensory (-keysste-), Inference followed by Present Sensory (-keyssney), Past Sensory followed by Reported (-teray), Inference followed by Reported (-keysstay), Inference followed by Past Sensory and Reported (-keyssteray). Multiple making of evidentials in Korean seems to follow combination restrictions: i) Inference comes before Direct Knowledge, ii) Present Sensory and Reported cannot be marked in the same clause, iii) Reported must come after other evidential markers, iv) Past Sensory and Present Sensory cannot be marked in the same clause. Because of these restrictions, only 5 out of dozens possible multiple evidential marking combinations are observed in Korean. This paper takes inflectional suffixes including evidential markers in Korean as syntatic markers and argues that syntactic markers have their own scope and contribute semantic meaning to the scope not to the full sentence. Evidential markers in double marking have different syntactic scope and add not contradictory but complementary meanings to the preposition to express subtle and delicate evidential-related meanings.