한국어 종결어미 ‘-다니’에 관한 연구: 인용구문으로 환원 불가능한 경우를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper deals with Korean sentential ending –tani, especially when it cannot be analyzed as a reduced form of a quotative construction containing a covert quotative verb (hereafter non-quotative –tani). Here I adopt Kang’s (2020) proposal, according to which non-quotative –tani can be used in three different constructions, that is, in rhetorical questions, in echo questions, and in exclamatives. Among these three usages, I begin with non-quotative –tani in rhetorical questions, and argue that –tani in rhetorical questions contains an evidential morpheme indicating that the speaker has best possible evidence for the embedded proposition. Then I further argue that this evidential takes a proposition whose denotation is not just a set of possible worlds, as usually assumed in standard formal semantics (Heim & Kratzer 1998, von Fintel & Heim 2020, among others), but a set of sets of possible worlds, as proposed in Inquisitive Semantics (Ciardelli et al. 2018, among others). Given this, I show that the rhetorical meaning of non-quotative –tani in questions can be compositionally derived by assuming that the speaker does not have any ground or evidence regarding any of the answers given in the extension of the question. Finally, I suggest that this proposal may be extended to other two usages of non-quotative –tani, which will result in a unified and more economic analysis of non-quotative –tani.