On the Intervention Effect Caused by Korean -man

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on the nature of the intervention effect, focusing on Korean -man ‘only’. Two most recent studies on the intervention effect caused by Korean -man are critically reviewed, and a new analysis is proposed based on 1) distinction between psychologically salient and non-salient presuppositions, which is based on the notion of the strong contextual felicity, 2) two characteristics of language processing, namely, the serial order of linguistic input and the interactive parallel processing, and 3) different informational statuses of the prejacent meaning of -man depending on different contexts. The current analysis is superior to the two previous studies in that 1) the source of the intervention effect proposed here is psychologically more plausible and that 2) it is compatible with the withinand inter-individual variability among speakers with respect to the degree of the intervention effect.