The Effect of Prosody on Veridicality Inferences in Korean

Abstract

Certain attitude verbs in Korean such as al- and gieogha- (standardly translated as ‘know’ and ‘remember’, respectively) may give rise to veridicality inferences, i.e., inferences that their propositional complements are true. These inferences arise systematically, but selectively. In particular, they arise only under certain prosody. When they do arise, they project through various entailment-canceling operators and are understood to be backgrounded, suggesting that they are presuppositional in nature. I characterize these patterns as prosodically-conditioned factivity inferences. I propose an analysis that can capture this systematic variation in factivity, which crucially occurs below the level of projection (i.e., variation within ‘local contexts’). The analysis is in the vein of Abusch (2010) and Simons et al. (2017), in that it makes use of a general pragmatic reasoning process involving alternatives. I argue that asymmetries in meaning between the positive verbs (al- ‘know’, gieokha- ‘remember’) and their negative suppletive counterparts (moreu- ‘not know’, ggameok- ‘forget’) play an important role in deriving the prosodically-conditioned factivity inferences. In connection with this claim, I propose a new pragmatic principle that governs how alternatives come into contrast with each other. Via the activation of this principle, interpretations of verbs that are presuppositionally underspecified can obtain factive interpretations whenever their contrasting factive alternatives are activated.