Lexical aspect and evidential meaning

Lexical aspect and evidential meaning

This paper examines the effect of lexical aspect on the evidential reading of a Korean sentence with the evidential marker -te. I show that statives and inchoatives exhibit different patterns of interaction with tense in a -te sentence. I analyze both cases in line with Lee (2011a, 2013), and account for how evidential readings arise from relevant components in the proposed analysis. On the basis of the compositional analysis, I argue that the generalization on the interaction between tense and -te, proposed in the literature (Chung 2005, 200; Lee 2011a,b, 2013, inter alia), holds for the -te sentences with both predicate types.