earticle

영어

This paper argues that the Korean suffix -te is not an evidential marker, nor a simple tense marker, but a spatial deictic tense that induces an evidential environment. The suffix -te not only denotes a temporally deictic past time, but also the speaker's spatial deictic vantage point at the reference time (cf. Faller (2004)), which serves as an anchoring point (i.e., “shifted here and now”) for evidentials. It is suggested that Korean has two distinctive deictic (indexical) tenses: simple deictic tense and spatial deictic tense. The difference is that the former does not necessarily require the reference to the speaker's own perceptual field or to his/her spatial location. This analysis provides a way to potentially incorporate even pure evidentials in other languages into the semantics of tense.