Korean evidentials and assertion

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates Korean evidential sentences in relation to the assertive speech act. The author shows that a Korean direct evidential sentence expresses two seemingly unrelated meanings—a meaning that the speaker directly witnessed the event and a meaning regarding the speaker's attitude such as ‘psychological distance’, ‘weakened reliability’, and ‘lack of responsibility’. It is argued that when the Korean speaker chooses an evidential sentence rather than a regular declarative non-evidential sentence, (s)he relates his (her) association to the information without believing or making a commitment to it. In other words, the speaker of an evidential sentence simply serves as a passive channel through which the proposition is obtained and delivered to the hearer. It is concluded that a Korean evidential sentence not only conveys an evidential meaning, i.e. the source of information, but also expresses the non-assertive mode, i.e. a presentative speech act (cf. Faller, 2002). One implication of the proposed analysis is that evidentials in general may lack assertive speech acts. On the other hand, it is possible that the assertive mode is subsumed under the evidential system in some languages or under the speech acts system in others.