UC San Diego

This dissertation is the first-ever systematic investigation of the semantics and pragmatics of Echo Questions (EQs) in Korean. EQs are an understudied type of interrogative clause that conveys a question seeking confirmation or repetition of what has been previously said. EQs in Korean provide new insights into the typology and theories of interrogative clauses, as previous analyses on EQs in the most-studied (i.e., Indo-European) languages fail to accurately capture the characterizing properties of EQs in Korean. I propose a novel analysis that treats EQs as semantically identical to and pragmatically distinct from ordinary questions. I show that, while both EQs and ordinary questions denote a set of possible answers, EQs bear the presupposition that there exists at least one possible answer that has already been introduced in the discourse by uttering a sentence conveying it. I provide five pieces of empirical support from novel descriptive and experimental data from Korean: (i) EQs are overtly distinguished from ordinary questions by tako↑, a non-decomposable combination of the clause-final particle (CFP) tako and the rising intonation (↑); (ii) the form of EQ CFP must match the speech act of the discourse antecedent; (iii) polar (yes/no) and wh-EQs share the same morpho-syntax except for the presence/absence of a wh-word; (iv) EQs do not require obligatory prosodic stress on echoed wh-words; and (v) EQs with multiple wh-words allow for the same readings—single-pair, pair-list, and functional—as ordinary questions with multiple-wh words. Based on these new empirical generalizations on Korean, I claim that the EQ CFP tako↑ triggers the EQ interpretation by introducing the presupposition about what has been said. I show that the properties of EQs in Korean can be most straightforwardly accounted for by my novel analysis using previously established semantic theories and devices used for the analysis of questions without introducing new semantic terms. Ultimately, this dissertation highlights the importance of cross-linguistic examination by enriching the formal theory of questions through previously unnoticed data.