Uncommon Common Grounds and the Korean Reportative Evidential –tay

Abstract

The Korean reportative evidential –tay has been analyzed as marking a presentative speech act. Analyzing –tay as such captures the observation that –tay utterances do not correlate with speaker belief in the truth of the embedded proposition. However, the presentative speech act analysis cannot account for unacceptability of certain sequences of –tay sentences. My proposal is that –tay instead shifts the context of evaluation from that of the discourse participants to that of a non-participant individual. I argue that this accounts for the unacceptability observed, and furthermore, that presentative force correlates with this shifting.