Temporal Marking in Korean Attributive Clauses and Linguistic Encoding of Human Memory* Min-Joo Kim Department of English Texas Tech University, USA [email protected] Subscribing to the widely held view among linguists that human language provides a window on the human mind, the present paper attempts to establish a connection between grammatical structures and the organization of human memory by looking at a set of temporal markers that appear in realis attribu- tive clauses in Korean, namely, -(u)n, -nu-n, and -te-n. The central claim will be that the behavior of these three markers showcases how human language may encode “semantic memory” and “episodic memory” in the sense of Tulving (1972, 1983, 2002, 2005). The analysis proposed here provides indirect support for differentiating between semantic memory and episodic memory as well as dividing memory systems into sub-types. Additionally, the semantic properties of the Korean attributive clause markers uncovered here advances our under- standing of the intricate relations that hold between grammatical categories that are known as Tense, Aspect, Mood, and Evidentiality (or TAME) in the linguistics literature. Key words: linguistic encoding of memory, semantic memory, episodic memory, temporal marking, TAME, Korean * I would like to first thank Östen Dahl for kindly sharing his paper (Dahl to ap- pear) with me at a crucial time. Next, I would like to thank Professor Chungmin Lee and three anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback. I am also indebted to Roman Taraban for insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Lastly, thanks are due to Chunghye Han, Jungmin Kang, Jeong-Hee Kim, Jong-Bok Kim, Jooyoung Kim, Heejeong Ko Seunghun Lee, Sung-Won Lee, Dongsik Lim, Seungho Nam, Jae-Hyun Sung, and James Hye Suk Yoon for judgments and com- ments on the data regarding the attributive clause marker -te-n in Korean. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for any remaining errors or inadequacies. Journal of Cognitive Science 14: 77-109, 2013 ©2013 Institute for Cognitive Science, Seoul National University 78 Min-Joo Kim 1. Introduction A widely held belief among linguists is that human language provides a window on the human mind (e.g., Chomsky 1968/2006; Pinker 1994, 2007). Under this belief or independently of it, a possible connection between grammatical structures and the organization of human memory has occa- sionally been suggested (e.g., Chafe 1973; Dahl 1983; Dahl to appear). For example, Dahl (to appear) claims that there is at least an indirect relation- ship between memory and linguistic phenomena related to time, i.e., Tense, Aspect, Mood, and Evidentiality (TAME), and “TAME categories may reflect how or from where the information expressed in a sentence is stored in the brain” (p. 3).1 The present paper is an attempt to further establish the connection between the make-up of grammar and human memory by probing a set of TAME markers that appear in realis attributive clauses in Korean, namely, -(u)n, -nu-n, and -te-n. The central claim will be that the behavior of these markers showcases how human language may encode “semantic memory” and “episodic memory” in the sense of Tulving (1972, 1983, 2002, 2005) and what kind of derivative relationship may hold between the two types of memory systems. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 offers a brief introduction to semantic memory and episodic memory, in particular how episodic memory differs from semantic memory. Section 3 demonstrates how the two types of memory systems can be encoded in a human language by using data that are made available from Korean attributive clauses. Section 4 concludes the paper with a brief summary and implications for future research. 1 To this end, Dahl points out how sleep gives rise to “consolidation of memory”; how in numerous unrelated languages, Tense distinctions are made on the basis of what he calls “hodiernality”, i.e., referring to the day of the utterance; and how what counts as “hodiernal past” vs. “pre-hodiernal past” is determined by the time when people go to sleep in various cultures, as documented by Crane (2011) for To- tela (a Bantu language spoken in Zambia). Temporal Marking in Korean and Linguistic Encoding of Memory 79 2. Episodic Memory vs. Semantic Memory What are known as semantic memory and episodic memory in the literature are both sub-systems of propositional memory (or declarative memory), which, along with procedural memory, constitutes human memory at the macro level.2 In Tulving’s seminal work in 1972, the two sub-types of propositional memory were believed to interact with each other at all times, but they differ in that while semantic memory is concerned with a person’s “abstract, timeless, encyclopedic knowledge” of the world that he/she shares with others, episodic memory is concerned with “unique, concrete, personal experiences” dated in the rememberer’s past. More recent work by Tulving identifies more fine-grained differences between the two types of memory systems. For example, Tulving (1983) shows that they differ from each other in terms of (i) information, (ii) operation, and (iii) applications (or the role that memory plays in a broad range of human affairs), as summarized in Table 1. Among the differ- ences between episodic memory and semantic memory listed in Table 1, three most notable are that (i) the reference for episodic memory is “self”, whereas the reference for semantic memory is “the universe”; (ii) that episodic memory is later developing than semantic memory; and that (iii) episodic memory is a human-specific cognitive ability, whereas semantic memory is not. Tulving (2005) makes additional comments on the differences between episodic memory and semantic memory. He claims that only healthy humans older than 4 years old possess what he calls “autonoetic” (“self- knowing”) episodic memory, and the possession of this particular type of 2 Propositional memory systems differ from procedural memory systems in sev- eral respects: e.g., (i) information handled by the former has a truth value, whereas information handled by the latter does not; (ii) information retrieved from the former can be contemplated introspectively or attended to internally, whereas that retrieved from the latter cannot; and (iii) propositional knowledge about something can be communicated to others through language or other methods, whereas proce- dural knowledge can only be demonstrated through highly specific behavior (Tulv- ing 1984: 224). 80 Min-Joo Kim episodic memory allows humans to “mentally travel” both into the past and into the future through “subjective time”, whereby consciously “re-living” or “re-experiencing” things that happened in the past or “foreseeing”, “pre- experiencing”, and/or “anticipating” things that may happen in the future. Other species clearly possess semantic memory, and they may even possess some type of episodic memory, but crucially, they lack the ability to men- tally travel into the past or into the future with a clear mental awareness of doing so. That is, their episodic memory is not “autonoetic”, so is far less developed than what humans possess. Yet another important property Tulving (2005) ascribes to episodic memory is that it “represents an extension of semantic memory, both in its emergence in the course of evolution and in terms of its operations” (p. 13). More specifically, in Tulving’s theoretical framework, which is known as “the serial parallel independent (SPI) model” (Tulving 1993, 1995), episodic memory is considered a derivative of semantic memory, and the two types of memory can co-exist and operate in a parallel fashion. In more recent years, Tulving’s classification of memory has been chal- lenged. For example, Fivush (2011) takes issue with Tulving’s (2002) defi- nition of episodic memory, according to which, one of the two essential properties of episodic memory is memory of the specific “what, where, and when” of an experience, and the other of which is its “involvement with autonoetic consciousness”, i.e., the awareness of self having experienced the event in the past, which involves mental travel in time. Fivush claims that only the first type of memory should constitute episodic memory and the second type should be relabeled as what he calls “autobiographical memory”. His reasoning for such reclassification is that while even animals have the ability to recall specific past events including the information on the what, where, and when, only humans have the ability to recall past events involving autonoetic consciousness and notably, this ability “goes beyond the episodic memory function of guiding current and future behav- ior to serve social and emotional functions, including self-definition, self-in- relation, and self-regulation (Bluck & Alea 2002; Fivush 1988; Fivush et al. 2003)” (Fivush 2011: 560-561). Despite such disagreements about exactly what counts as episodic mem- ory and what counts as autobiographical memory, however, authors includ- Temporal Marking in Korean and Linguistic Encoding of Memory 81 Table 1. D ifferences between Episodic and Semantic Memory (Tulving 1983, Table 3.1, p. 35). Diagnostic feature Episodic Semantic Information Source Sensation Comprehensive Units Events; episodes Facts; ideas; concepts Organization Temporal Conceptual Reference Self Universe Veridicality Personal belief Social agreement Operations Registration Experiential Symbolic Temporal coding Present; direct Absent; indirect Affect More important Less important Inferential capacity Limited Rich Context dependency More pronounced Less pronounced Vulnerability Great Small Access Deliberate Automatic Retrieval queries Time? Place? What? Retrieval consequences Change system System unchanged Retrieval mechanisms Synergy Unfolding Recollective experience Remembered past Actualized knowledge Retrieval report Remember Know Developmental sequence Late Early Childhood amnesia Affected Unaffected Applications Education Irrelevant Relevant General utility Less useful More useful Artificial intelligence Questionable Excellent Human intelligence Unrelated Related Empirical evidence Forgetting Analysis of language Laboratory tasks Particular episodes General knowledge Legal testimony Admissible; eyewitness Inadmissible; expert Amnesia Involved Not involved Bicameral men No Yes 82 Min-Joo Kim ing Fivush (2011) still unequivocally agree (i) that what Tulving calls epi- sodic memory is a human-specific phenomenon whereas semantic memory is shared by other intelligent species; (ii) that Tulvingian episodic memory involves a conscious self engaging in experiences that link the past self to current self along a personal time line; and (iii) that Tulvingian episodic memory is late developing, typically coming into existence around age 5. Given such consensus among authors, then, we can conclude that what Tulving calls episodic memory, i.e., a memory that involves “autonoetic consciousness”, is distinct from semantic memory, and only humans possess it. And if we believe that human language provides a window on the human mind, then, we are led to hypothesize that episodic memory in the sense of Tulving is grammatically encoded, and it is likely to be encoded in ways different from semantic memory. In what follows, I test this set of hypotheses by looking at the semantic functions of attributive clauses in Korean from the standpoint of episodic memory and semantic memory. I have chosen to examine attributive clauses rather than non-embedded clauses here because when talking about memory, humans typically talk about what they remember from the past and yet the “what” part of what they remember can be either an eventual- ity or some property they associate with themselves or with someone else. Hence, in order to investigate how human language grammatically encodes a Tulvigian sense of episodic memory, we need to probe an embedded clausal structure which serves as the complement of a remembering verb or as a clausal modifier of an individual-denoting expression, such as the attributive clause construction in Korean. 3. L inguistic Encoding of Episodic and Semantic Memories: A View from Korean I begin this section by briefly introducing some of the basic properties of Korean and its attributive clause construction that we will be looking at. 3.1. Basic Properties of Realis Attributive (ATT) Clauses in Korean Korean is morphologically an agglutinative language and syntactically a Subject Object Verb (SOV) constituent order language (Sohn 1999). Scram- Temporal Marking in Korean and Linguistic Encoding of Memory 83 bling is possible but the language exhibits strict head-finality (e.g., the pred- icate always occurs at the end of a sentence). Due to its agglutinative morphological characteristics, attributive (ATT) clauses in Korean are comprised of a verb stem and a relative clause (RC) marker, both of which are bound morphemes (although one is a right-bound morpheme and the other is a left-bound morpheme). ATT clauses in Korean may or may not contain a gap. If they contain a gap, then they instantiate externally-headed relative clauses (RCs), which contain an empty category that is co-indexed with the head noun (i.e., the noun that an RC modifies). If they do not contain a gap, then, they instanti- ate gap-less noun-modifying clauses or nominalized clauses that occur in Subject or Object position. ATT clauses in Korean can bear either realis or irrealis mood (Lee 1993; Sohn 1999), and those bearing realis mood will be our main concern here. Realis ATT clauses in Korean end with the adnominalizer/RC marker -(u)n3 and, between the verb stem and the RC marker, additional TAME markers may occur, namely, -nu-, -te-, and -ess-te-. To see this, consider (1), where the first four data illustrate RCs and the last illustrates a gap-less ATT clause. (Here and below, ‘e’ stands for a gap or an empty category that is co-indexed with the head noun of an ATT clause.4) 3 The realization of the vowel “u” in the RC marker -(u)n is determined by whether the preceding stem ends in a consonant or not. If it ends in a consonant, then “u” is realized; if not, the RC marker surfaces as -n. 4 In transcribing the Korean data presented here, I adopt Yale Romanization (Martin 1992), following standard practice in Korean linguistics. And for the interlinear glosses, the following abbreviations are used. But I do not gloss the morphemes -nu- and -te- here because there is a lack of consensus among authors concerning their exact syntactic/semantic status. Concerning the syntax/semantics of -nu-, see HS Lee 1991, 1993, Ko 2007, and references therein; concerning -te-, see Yang 1972, HB Choi 1983, Huh 1987, HS Lee 1993, KD Lee 1993, Ko 2007, KS Chung 2007, 2010, and C Lee 2012. Acc: accusative case; Ant: anterior aspect; CL: classifier; Conn: connective; Cop: copula; Hon: honorific marker; Imprf: imperfective aspect; Infml: informal style; Ind: indicative sentence ending; Loc: locative; Nom: nominative case; Nml: nomi- nalizer; N.Pst: non-past tense; Pass: passive voice; Prf; perfective aspect; Pst: past 84 Min-Joo Kim (1) Korean Realis ATT Clauses with Differing TAME Markers:5 a. [e (pangkum/ecey) ttena-Ø]-n saram i i [__ (just.now/yesterday) leave-Ant]-Rel.Rr person ‘a person who (has) left (just now/yesterday)’ b. [e (cikum) ttena-nu-]-n saram i i [__ (now) leave-NU-]-Rel.Rr person ‘a person who is leaving (now)’ c. [e (ku ttay) ttena-te-]-n saram i i tense; Q: question ending; Ouot: quotative marker; Rel: relativizer; Rr: realis mood; Top: topic. 5 In Korean, ATT clauses and non-ATT clauses have different TAME systems although they seem to employ similar morphemes. To illustrate, while ATT-clauses employ the null morpheme Ø to express temporal precedence in non-stative con- texts, in the same contexts, non-ATT clauses employ the suffix -ess-, as shown in (i). In addition, when occurring in ATT clauses, the morpheme -nu- is compatible with -ko iss- but when occurring in non-ATT clauses, it is not. To see this, consider (ii). (i) a. Past tense in an ATT clause: [e ecey ttena-Ø]-n Cinho i i [__ yesterday leave-Ant]-Rel C. ‘Cinho, who left yesterday’ b. Past tense in a non-ATT clause: Cinho-nun ecey ttena-ess-ta. C.-Top yesterday leave-Pst-Ind ‘Cinho left yesterday.’ (ii) a. Compatibility between -nu- and -ko iss- in an ATT clause: [ e cikum ttena-ko iss-nu-]-n saram i i [__ now leave-Conn exist-NU-]-Rel person ‘the person who is leaving now.’ b. Incompatibility between -nu- and -ko iss- in a non-ATT clause: Cinho-nun cikum ttena-ko iss-(*-nu-)-ta. C.-Top now leave-Conn exist-(NU)-Ind I ntended: ‘Cinho is leaving now.’ (Note: only grammatical when -nu- is absent.) Temporal Marking in Korean and Linguistic Encoding of Memory 85 [__ (that time) leave-TE-]-Rel.Rr person ‘a person who was leaving (then)’ d. [e ttena-ess-te-]-n saram i i [__ leave-Ant-TE-]-Rel.Rr person ‘a person who had left’ e. [Mina-ka ttena-Ø]-n sasil [Mina-Nom leave-Ant]-Rel.Rr fact ‘the fact that Mina (has) left’ As indicated by the English translations of the above data, each of the grammatical markers that occur between the verb stem and the RC marker in Korean contributes some sort of aspectual semantics, i.e., they specify the relation between the situation time and the topic time. More specifically, in (1a), the null marker Ø indicates that the situation at hand temporally precedes the topic time; that is, it behaves as if it carries the semantics of an anterior or perfective marker. In (1b), the morpheme -nu- indicates that the event of someone leaving is in progress at the topic time, so it seems to carry the semantics of a non-past progressive marker. In (1c), the same event was on-going at some time before the speech time, so the morpheme -te- seems to carry the semantics of a past progressive marker. Finally, in (1d), the event was completed before some past time, so the complex marker -ess-te- seems to contribute a pluperfect (i.e., ‘past in the past’) meaning here. A closer examination quickly reveals, however, that the four temporal markers just introduced are not just concerned with Aspect or Tense; rather, they have something to do with Mood, a grammatical category that is con- cerned with propositional attitudes or knowledge ascriptions (Aikhenvald 2004), and Evidentiality, a grammatical category that has to do with indi- cating informational source (Chafe & Nichols 1986; Aikhenvald & Dixon 2001). And this is particularly true of -nu- and -te- that co-occur with the RC marker. Since it is well established that -nu- and -te- behave differ- ently when they occur as part of the RC marker as opposed to as part of the verb cluster of a non-embedded clause (e.g., Lee 1993, Lee 2012), here and below, I treat -nu-n and -te-n as complex clusters, rather than separating -nu- and -te- out from -(u)n. 86 Min-Joo Kim To illustrate the modal or evidential nature of -nu-n and -te-n, consider first (2), which contains -te-n. In (2), -te-n has the semantics of a past habitual marker, rather than a past progressive marker, unlike in (1c). And interestingly enough, depending on context, this sentence may or may not be uttered felicitously: it can be uttered felicitously in the contexts given in (3) but not in the context given in (4). To verify this judgment, I conducted a survey with 12 native speakers of Korean (6 males and 6 females), and eight of them said that they can only accept sentence (2) in context (3a), two said that they can accept it either in (3a) or (3b) but not in (3c), and the remaining two said that they can accept it in all three contexts including (3c) (and there was no correlation between gender and the informant’s permis- siveness on (2)). (2) Ce kes-i [[yec-nal-ey Con-i e sal-te-]-n i That thing-Nom [[old-day-Loc C.-Nom __ live-TE-]-Rel cip]-i-ya. i house]-Cop-Ind.Infml ‘That is the house in which John used to live.’ (3) Possible contexts for (2): a. I n the past, I saw John living in the house that we’re looking at right now. b. J ohn is a famous (historical) figure and everybody knows where he used to live in the past, namely, the house we’re looking at right now. c. S omeone or something I completely trust (e.g., my mother or the CNN news) has informed me that the house we’re looking at right now is where John used to live. (4) Impossible context for (2): J ohn is someone who is not famous and I neither personally wit- nessed where he used to live nor learned from an entirely reliable source about where he used to live. Although there is inter-speaker variation on the judgment, what matters for