A Data-based Analysis of Entailment-canceling Operators in Korean

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to provide an empirical analysis of entailment-canceling operators with a focus on presupposition projection in Korean. Recently, entailment-canceling operators are understood as contextual factors of presupposition projection, wherein speakers are sometimes committed to a clausal complement of a factive verb (e.g., know). This implies that contextual factors may impact the projection phenomena along with (non-)factivity of embedding verbs, thereby projection shows variability with respect to speaker commitment. In this paper, we use the annotated corpus of Korean CommitmentBank that provides 94 naturally occurring discourses embedding the entailment canceling operators with speaker commitment data. We identify the entailment-canceling operators that are not neutral to the speaker commitment. In particular, the modal marker –l swu iss (‘may’), conditional marker -eto (‘even if’), and yes-no polar questions strongly impact the speaker commitment to the clausal complement. Furthermore, we classify (non-)factivity of some predicates and complementizers based on the certainty rating scores of Korean native speakers. Altogether, our work provides the empirical foundation for the theoretical study of presuppositional projection in Korean.