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Article published In: Relationality: Discursive constructions of Asian Pacific American identities
Edited by Adrienne Lo and Angela Reyes
[Pragmatics 14:2/3] 2004
► pp. 235–256

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Evidentiality and morality in a Korean heritage language school

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 June 2004
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.14.2-3.08lo
Previous work on Korean grammar has claimed that one person can not have access to another person’s thoughts, feelings or sensations, as indicated by the use of evidential markers. By looking at cases in which a teacher at a Korean heritage language school claims to read her students’ minds with a high degree of certainty, I demonstrate how expressions of epistemic stance relate to moral evaluation. Speakers portray their access to the thoughts and sensations of individuals who they deem morally worthy as more distant and uncertain. When individuals are evaluated as morally suspect, however, speakers represent these persons’ emotions, thoughts and sensations as self-evident displays of affect. This paper thus argues that evidential marking in Korean interaction is a social act through which interlocutors morally evaluate others.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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