Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper provides a unified semantic and pragmatic analysis of the sentence mood in Korean in terms of the various updates to the common ground in structured DRT. All clauses have the uniform discourse effect of steering the common ground to a preferred subset of the possible worlds with different levels of authority. In addition, honorifics were given a novel analysis in terms of the speaker authority for her preferences and conversational negotiations. The proposed theory offered a new perspective to utterance force and social meaning as well as a concrete tool to analyze them.