Evidentiality in Korean conditional constructions

The aim of this paper is to report that the firsthand evidential marker -te- can be employed in counterfactual conditional constructions in Korean. The phenomenon is of special interest, since it has been claimed that evidentials are not normally used in irrealis clauses (Anderson 1986: 274-275). Although it turns out that -te-'s core evidential function seems not in focus, I argue that the use of -te- in the protasis is, in fact, an optimal distancing strategy that conceptually licenses counterfactual conditional constructions in Korean; -te-'s functions of accommodating backgrounded information and of marking conceptual distance (Kwon 2012a) are exploited and they enable the constructions to convey more distanced counterfactuality than those without -te-, even implicating the speaker's nonagentivity or helplessness on the past event. I discuss these seemingly noncanonical phenomena within the Mental Spaces Theory framework (Dancygier and Sweetser 2005); I rely in the main on the system of representation used by Dancygier and Sweetser in their mental spaces analysis of conditionals, including their use of shading to represent counterfactuality. However, I introduce some new elements to the diagrams, including using the layering of spaces to represent additional distancing strategies.