The direct evidential -te in Korean: Its interaction with person and experiencer predicates

Abstract

This paper discusses the complex relations among the direct evidential -te, person, and experiencer predicates in Korean. The questions of the paper are: (i) how the three components are related with each other in the evidential sentences, and (ii) how the interactions of the three components can be formally analyzed to correctly license only the well-formed evidential sentences. I show that in direct evidential construction with a non-private predicate (e.g. pwutulep- ‘soft’), the asserter/epistemic authority (i.e. the speaker na ‘I’ in declarative or the addressee ne ‘you’ in question) must be the experiencer of the predicate, but there is no such constraint in direct evidential construction with a private predicate (e.g. aphu- ‘sick’). I also show that the direct evidential construction with a non-private predicate is an instance of self-ascription. Then I propose an analysis of the experiencer predicates and associated lexical rules in the Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) (Copestake, et al., 2005) of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Sag, et al., 2003).