대한언어학회 전자저널

Crosby, Drew & Sim, Rok. (2025). -Nuntey for not-at-issue content: A preliminary survey of procedural meaning in Korean. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 33(3), 97-128. This paper examines the Korean discourse connective -nuntey, proposing that it encodes procedural meaning and marks the clause it attaches to as not-at-issue. Drawing on Carston's (2016) diagnostics for procedural expressions, and the projectivity taxonomy of Tonhauser et al. (2013) tests for not-at-issueness, the study combines theoretical analysis with evidence from a small-scale elicitation survey involving four native Korean speakers. The results suggest that -nuntey consistently patterns with markers that convey backgrounded, non-truth-conditional information, guiding the hearer to infer a contextual relation between the -nuntey clause and the host utterance. This account unifies utterance-medial and utterance-final uses within a single Relevance-Theoretic framework, providing a more principled explanation of its discourse-pragmatic function. The paper concludes by suggesting directions for future research, including broader empirical testing and comparative analysis of related connectives such as -ciman and -killay. Overall, the findings contribute to a deeper understanding of procedural meaning and the ways in which Korean discourse connectives encode not-at-issue content.

# discourse connectives # procedural meaning # not-at-issueness # -nuntey # information structure

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