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영어

Chung, Kyung-Sook. 2012. The Semantics of the Korean Sentence-Final Suffix -ney: in Relation to Evidentiality and Mirativity. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 995-1016. The Korean sentence-final suffix–ney has been analyzed as an epistemic modal, an evidential, or a mirative. This paper claims that -ney is not an epistemic modal nor an evidential although it closely relates to evidentiality in that it indicates that the speaker serves as the acquirer of the evidence for a given proposition at the utterance time. Instead it is argued that -ney should be analyzed as a mirative because it indicates that the expressed proposition is new or unexpected and thus unassimilated to the speaker’s existing knowledge. Furthermore, it is argued that this mirative meaning is not sufficient to account for -ney because it requires that the speaker should be involved in the proposition objectively. The paper concludes that -ney has three meaning components:(i) evidence acquisition, (ii) new and unassimilated information, and (iii) objectification of the speaker. (Pusan National University)