The 1st person restriction on Korean evidential marker '-te': focusing on subject-oriented psych-predicates

화자지향 심리술어와 증거성 표지 '-더'의 1인칭 제약

  • Received : 2015.11.14
  • Accepted : 2015.12.21
  • Published : 2015.12.31

Abstract

This paper explores the 1st person restrictions on the evidential -te, focusing on the cases where it appears with the speaker-oriented psych-predicates in Korean. It has been widely discussed that the 1st person restriction can be freely circumvented when -te is used with the speaker-oriented psych-predicates. However, based on the novel observation that such an obviation can be varied with respect to the types of the subordinate clauses which modify the evidential sentences, we propose that the 1st person restriction should be explained in terms of the situation-based felicity condition of -te, as discussed in Lim (2014): it arises if the situation where the speaker acquires evidence cannot be the same as, or be included by, the situation where the prejacent is true. To show this, we discuss how the meaning of the speaker-oriented psych-predicates interacts with the felicity condition of -te, and how this interaction makes the distinctive obviation environments of the 1st person restriction on -te, unlike other types of predicates.

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