Evidentiality is a linguistic category that specifies the source of information conveyed, such as direct observation, inference, or hearsay (Aikhenvald 2004). Through a detailed study of three distinct evidential readings that arise from the Korean evidentials –te and –ney, this dissertation studies the close interaction between evidentiality and other semantic categories, particularly temporality and modality. The goal of the dissertation is to develop a formal analysis which adequately captures the following empirical patterns of the meaning
of Korean evidential utterances.
First, three distinct evidential readings, i.e. direct vs. inferential vs. reportative, arise from the evidentials –te and –ney, by means of their interactions with tense and mood. Second, Korean evidential sentences behave like epistemically modalized sentences with respect to anchoring patterns, constraints with their subjects, and modal subordination. Third, the meaning contribution of Korean evidentials in discourse has a dierent status from that of the expressions occurring in the scope of the evidentials: unlike the latter, the former cannot be the main point of utterances. But the two dierent types of implications exhibit a bi-directional interaction in the course of interpreting a single evidential utterance.
I formally analyze the first two empirical findings in Kratzer’s (1977, 1981, 1991) modal theory. In particular, I capture the evidential meaning of Korean evidentials in terms of the two central components in Kratzer’s modal theory, i.e. the modal base and the ordering source. For the not-at-issue meaning contribution of Korean evidentials, and its interaction with at-issue meanings, I discuss why Faller’s (2002) and Potts’ (2005) theories cannot be applied to the meaning of Korean evidentials, and a dynamic semantic analysis is sketched out in terms of Murray’s (2010) formal system that models discourse anaphora. The empirical findings presented in this dissertation points to a close connection between evidentiality and temporality and modality, and suggest that a theory of evidentiality should allow for interactions between at-issue and not-at-issue content, as Amaral et al. (2007) has argued for at-issue and not-at-issue content in general.