한국어의 직접 증거성 형태소 '-더'와 조건문: 그 의미와 이론적 함의에 대한 시론

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to investigate how –te in consequents affects the interpretation of conditionals. As widely discussed, the marker –te in Korean is treated as a direct evidential which introduces the Implication that before the utterance time, the speaker acquired direct perceptive evidence with respect to the prejacent. Given this, we remark that when –te is employed in a consequent of conditionals, the event/situation denoted by an antecedent must be anchored to the actual world due to the implication of –te. Given this, adopting Arregui's (2007) similarity-based analysis of would-conditionals, we provide a principled account to explain why conditionals with -te should be interpreted as metaphysical and indicative; namely, predictive conditional. We also show that the similarity-based analysis gives an explanation of why the antecedent of the conditional with -te should denote a repeatable event/situation.