Echo Declaratives in Korean: A Preliminary Case Study of Korean Declarative Ending -tako

초록

Korean sentential ending -tako has been dealt with in many previous studies as an ending used in echo questions. However, -tako can also be used in echo declarative sentences, which has not received much attention, as far as we can see. To fill this gap, this paper aims to analyze the sentential ending -tako in declarative sentences. For this purpose, this paper first describes the context where -tako can be felicitously employed in declaratives, and shows that the proposition under the scope of -tako (or the prejacent of -tako) is usually the same as the preceding utterance. This strongly suggests that echo declaratives with -tako may have the semantics similar to -tako in echo questions (Jang 2024, a.o.). However, crucially, unlike -tako in echo questions, the prejacent of -tako in echo declaratives need not show strict identity. In addition to this, as further differences between -tako in echo declaratives and that in echo questions, -tako in echo declaratives need not be uttered by the same conversational participant, or need not immediately follow the previously uttered proposition. To capture both of these similarities and differences between -tako in declaratives and -tako in questions, I propose that the prejacent of -tako should be regarded as a set of propositions (as assumed in Inquisitive Semantics: See Ciardelli et al. 2018, a.o.) rather than a set of possible worlds (as standardly assumed in formal semantics), and this prejacent should be entailed by a previous utterance in a discourse. I will then show that this proposal can explain the semantics of -tako in echo declaratives, even when they do not simply repeat the previous utterance. I also show that this analysis gives us further implications regarding the semantics and pragmatics of sentential endings in general.

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