Publications

Publication details [#68115]

Kwon, Iksoo. 2021. Between commitment and certainty: A cognitive semantic approach to an I promise construction in English. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 19 (1) : 51–79.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Journal DOI
10.1075/rcl

Annotation

This paper identifies another type of these epistemic uses. It focuses on constructional cues in complex-clause utterances of the form I promise X: whether or not the subject of the embedded clause X is congruent with ‘I’ in the main clause and whether the tense of X is past or non-past. It investigates how it is used epistemically, especially in its colloquial uses; how the constructional cues (the kind of subject and the tense information) influence its construal; and how the different conceptual structures underlying the construals of the commissive and the epistemic modal senses of the construction can be modeled within Mental-spaces theory. It also discusses that the conceptual structures may be differently reified cross-linguistically briefing on the Korean constructs yaksokha- ‘(I) promise’ and cangtamha- ‘(I) assure’.