Article published In:
Relationality: Discursive constructions of Asian Pacific American identitiesEdited by Adrienne Lo and Angela Reyes
[Pragmatics 14:2/3] 2004
► pp. 235–256
Edited by Adrienne Lo and Angela Reyes
[Pragmatics 14:2/3] 2004
► pp. 235–256
Evidentiality and morality in a Korean heritage language school
Previous work on Korean grammar has claimed that one person can not have access to another person’s thoughts, feelings or sensations, as indicated by the use of evidential markers. By looking at cases in which a teacher at a Korean heritage language school claims to read her students’ minds with a high degree of certainty, I demonstrate how expressions of epistemic stance relate to moral evaluation. Speakers portray their access to the thoughts and sensations of individuals who they deem morally worthy as more distant and uncertain. When individuals are evaluated as morally suspect, however, speakers represent these persons’ emotions, thoughts and sensations as self-evident displays of affect. This paper thus argues that evidential marking in Korean interaction is a social act through which interlocutors morally evaluate others.
Keywords: Evidentiality, Korean language, Epistemic stance, Subjectivity, Morality
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
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