의문 보문소로서의 ‘ㄹ지’: 상위 술어의 (비)진실성과 (비)사실성

Abstract

This article concerns the semantico-pragmatic role of the interrogative complementizer (u)lci in Korean. Thus far, compared to (u)nci, which has a variant of interrogative complementizer, (u)lci has received less attention. The main question we address is why (u)lci gives rise to epistemic modal reading (i.e., speaker’s/subject’s uncertainty) in the embedded clause. Given that the core properties of a complementizer can be characterized by the types of main predicates that it takes, the main focus will be the realization of matrix predicates in Korean. For the detailed discussion, we conduct a corpus study and empirically verify that the predicates taking (u)lci should be non-factive and non-veridical. Such a connection is naturally predicated because historically, (u)lci must have been grammaticalized from the combination of the irrealis mood marker (u)l and the bound noun do which leads to the idea that the lexicon of (u)lci in modern Korean has come to have an irrealis mood meaning. Accordingly, there exists a strong tendency to show a gradience between (u)lci and non-veridical predicates.