한국어 반사실 조건문에 관한 연구 - 전후건에 나타나는 ‘-었-’의 역할을 중심으로

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the semantics of Korean conditionals which are interpreted counterfactually (hereafter Korean counterfactual conditionals), focusing on the past tense -ess-. First we show that the presence or absence of the past tense -ess- in the antecedent of Korean conditionals is closely related to whether the presupposition introduced by the antecedent of conditionals is satisfied in the utterance context or not. Given this, we introduce Ippolito’s (2013) analysis on English counterfactual conditionals, which assumes that there can be three different layers of past tenses in English counterfactual conditionals, and different realizations of upper two layers of past tenses are related to whether the presupposition introduced by the antecedent is satisfied or not, and whether the conditional is interpreted as a counterfactual or not, respectively. Then, to apply her analysis to Korean, we classify Korean –(u)l kes- conditionals in terms of the following criteria: i) whether the presupposition introduced by the antecedent is satisfied or not; ii) whether the past tense -ess- is realized only in the consequent or both in the antecedent and in the consequent, and; iii) whether the past tense -ess- in the consequent appears before or after the modal –(u)l kes-. Then we discuss the structure and meaning of each type of Korean counterfactual conditionals, in comparison with various constructions of English conditionals discussed in Ippolito (2013).