The Reporting of Embedded Clause Types in Korean: A Reduced Reported Speech Analysis

초록

This paper examines Korean reportative hearsay constructions marked by forms such as –ta-y, -nya-y, -la-y, and –ca-y, and reevaluates their status within the domains of evidentiality and speech act structure. While previous studies have treated these forms as grammaticalized evidential markers or as functional heads in the Speech Act Phrase (SAP), this paper argues that they are more accurately analyzed as phonologically reduced (PR) reported speech (RS) constructions. Empirical data show that Korean PRRS constructions systematically correspond to non-PR RS forms across clause types--declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exhortative--while preserving propositional content and adding a reportative meaning equivalent to ‘someone said that S.’ The paper proposes that these forms derive from bi-clausal structures involving -ko and the verb ha- ‘say’, with surface forms resulting from PF reduction and a covert speech predicate retained at LF. Reconsidering Ceong’s (2016) SAP-based analysis, the paper demonstrates that its key insights, including source interpretation and clause-type uniformity, can be accounted for within a RS framework without positing additional functional projections. From a cross-linguistic perspective, Korean is shown to represent an intermediate stage where reduced RS constructions exhibit evidential-like meanings without full grammaticalization (cf. Jäger 2010). The findings support a gradient view of the relationship between reported speech and evidentiality.

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