The expression of modality in Korean - Institut für ...

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of truth itself, i.e. „it is necessarily true/false that p“, but commented on by Palmer ( 2 1990, 6)
that „alethic modality has been the main concern of logicians, but it has little place in ordinary
language“ (one example quoted by Conte (1995, 5) is Paul Watzlawik’s statement that one
cannot not communicate), or anancastic modality (also introduced by von Wright (1963, 10)
and defined as „a statement to the effect that something is (or is not) a necessary condition of
something else“ (which also plays only a marginal role at best in the linguistic study of
modality), or are coined in studies on individual languages.
Having briefly discussed the basic characteristics of the most common types of
modality, I will conclude this general discussion at this point and proceed to the second
principal preliminary of this work.
1.2. Korean
The following brief description is aimed at providing a basic notion of the most salient
linguistic features of the Korean language 20 in order to give a typological basis to this study of
modality.
1.2.1. General language data
The Korean language is spoken by approximately 70 million speakers 21 , including 42
million in South Korea and 23 million in North Korea. Nearly 5 million or 7% of the native
Korean speakers live outside the Korean peninsula, spread out over some 100 countries,
though most of the overseas population is concentrated in China (2,2 million), USA (1,3
million and by far the fastest growing group), Japan (700’000) and the former USSR
(500’000).
The Korean language is, by comparison, relatively homogeneous with only minor
geographically defined dialectal differences (the Korean peninsula is generally divided up into
seven dialectal zones, namely Hamgyong (North-East), P’yongan (North-West), Central
20 This is, of course, no attempt to give a full-fledged portrait of the Korean language. Good shorter general
descriptions are offered by e.g. Kim (1987) or Campbell (1991).
21 This and all following figures in this paragraph are based on statistical data from the year 1992, taken from
Sohn (1994) and Korean Overseas Information Service (1993).