직접 증거성 표지 ‘-더-’의 적절성 조건 연구: 시제 관계를 중심으로

초록

There has been considerable discussion on the characteristics of tense in sentences involving the direct perceptual evidential marker -te- in Korean. For instance, much literature points out that a past interpretation can arise even in the absence of the past tense marker -ess-, a context in which direct evidentiality obtains, suggesting that -essplays a more essential role in licensing indirect evidentiality than in encoding past temporal reference. Departing from this line of analysis, this paper critically reexamines the relative tense theory (Lee, 2013) to expose shortcomings in previous accounts, arguing that -ess- retains its function as a genuine past tense marker even when combined with -te-. We further analyze the range of temporal relations that arise when a null tense marker occurs with -te-. Taken together, it is demonstrated that -te- can convey inferential interpretations even with the null tense marker, and that the presence of -ess- does not necessarily yield indirect evidentiality. Building on these observations, we discuss how the felicity conditions for -te- should be defined, and then propose a novel analysis showing how variable evidentiality follows from the licensing conditions of -te-.

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