Space in Tense

This monograph explores the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality of Korean, which has a rich verbal inflectional system, and proposes novel treatments within the framework of compositional semantics. One of the major contributions is the demonstration that Korean has two types of deictic tense—simple deictic and spatial deictic tense. Spatial deictic tense refers to the notion of the speaker’s ‘perceptual field’ (or deictic range), as well as to temporality, functioning to set up a condition for a systematic evidential distinction. The research in this volume shows that the basic paradigm of evidentiality of Korean derives from the standard TMA system combined with the notion of space. This volume also shows that perfect and past tense utilize different primitives. The intended readership of this volume extends beyond Koreanists to scholars interested specifically in tense, mood, aspect, and evidentiality as well as in general theories of grammar and semantics-pragmatics.

Lisa Matthewson, University of British Columbia:
This book provides an original and coherent analysis of a major part of the Korean tense/aspect/evidentiality system. In spite of a large prior literature on these issues, many problems have remained unsolved. Kyung-Sook Chung’s book contributes novel empirical findings, as well as new analytical insights which have implications not just for Korean, but for natural language more generally.