An Epistemic Modal Approach to the Semantics of the Korean Temporal Marker ‐ess.

This paper is an attempt to provide a unitary semantics of the Korean temporal marker –ess that generates such various readings as a past‐tense reading, and a perfect reading, depending on the context of use. I argue in this paper that previous studies on –ess have failed to deal with it in a proper way, largely because none presents a semantic analysis which covers all the readings available in –ess in a unified way. To treat –ess uniformly, I incorporate modal semantics into the semantic analysis of –ess. The modal semantics, specifically the modal base and the ordering sources, serves to determine the domain for the interpretation of –ess, on the assumption that –ess is not ambiguous. This monosemous approach contributes to a better understanding of why and how –ess is interpreted differently from context to context.