Studies in conversation analysis have shown that in assessments, various linguistic resources are used to express epistemic stance in ordinary conversation. In Korean conversation, although the evidential and non-evidential functions of sentence-ending suffixes are well recognized, little research has been done on their relation to epistemic stance and their use in assessments. In this study, using naturally-occurring conversation data and the CA framework, I analyze 59 cases of a speaker’s first assessment regarding his/her interlocutor and 49 responses to these first (...) assessments. I argue that in Korean assessment pairs, the evidential and non-evidential SE suffixes are used as a resource for expressing epistemic stance. The results show that 74.4% of the first assessments were marked with an evidential SE suffix whereas 71.4% of the second assessments were marked with a non-evidential SE suffix. Furthermore, certain evidential SE suffixes are used as a resource to convey a downgraded epistemic stance in first assessments whereas certain non-evidential SE suffixes are used to express epistemic primacy in second assessments. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the Korean suffix -te, which has been variously analyzed as a marker of tense, aspect, tense–aspect, mood, mood–tense, or evidentiality. I argue against all of these approaches and propose instead that -te is a spatial deictic past tense, which triggers an evidential environment. It refers to a certain past time when the speaker either observed an event or some evidence of the event within his (her) perceptual field. Thus, the denotation of -te is ‘overlap’, not between (...) the speaker's perceptual field and the event itself, but between the speaker's perceptual field and the evidence of the event at the past reference time. To account for this denotation, propose an ‘evidence trace’ function as well as a ‘speaker's perceptual trace’ function (cf. M. Faller, J Semantics 21:45–85, 2004). My analysis shows that suffixes like -ess (which is traditionally analyzed as a perfect) play two roles, as an indirect evidential and a perfect, depending on whether they appear with the spatial deictic tense -te or with a simple deictic tense. I argue that in Korean two distinct tense systems—the regular tense–aspect system and the spatial deictic tense–evidential system—exist in parallel. Thus the proposed analysis allows evidentials to be subsumed under the formal theory of tense, aspect, and mood. (shrink)

The perennial fascination with the relationship between language and thought has generated much research across various disciplines. In recent years, commentators have called for closer examination of the connection between language acquisition and conceptual development (Bowerman & Levinson, 2001). Rather than assuming that language development always presupposes cognitive development, several researchers have started considering whether language learning could transform conceptual structure by making certain concepts available to the learner (e.g., de Villiers & Pyers, 1997; Gopnik & Choi, 1995; Bowerman, 1996).