Sentential Adverbs, Verbal Inflection and Their Interaction with Utterance Force in Korean

This paper is a preliminary attempt to better understand the behavior of a group of sentential adverbs and their interaction with the so-called mood or modality markers in Korean. By following Krifka’s (2023) proposal that the structure of an assertive clause consists of extra-propositional projections like Judgment Phrase (JP), Commitment Phrase (ComP), and Act Phrase (ActP), this paper shows that the traditional descriptive classification of Korean sentential adverbs can be re-evaluated and regrouped into JP modifiers, ComP modifiers, and ActP modifiers. It is also argued that these phrasal units above TP are headed by explicit verbal inflectional morphemes in Korean, which constrain the occurrence of certain adverbs, ultimately lending support to Krifka’s multi-layered analysis of an utterance.