I argue that the inflectional element ‘-teo-’ in Korean is an element essentially representing a modal meaning, rather than a marker for tense or a marker solely for evidentiality, and show that its semantic description contains an intensional function in terms of Kratzer’s(1981, 1991) formal semantic theory of modality, and a definedness condition on the existence of the direct evidence about the preceding proposition. After discussing previous three different approaches, i.e., tense based, solely modal based, and solely evidential based ones, I show that my definition combining the modality and the presupposition of direct evidence enables capturing the various semantic constraints of ‘-teo-’ sentences. In particular, I show that there is a general semantic requirement of an epistemic modal element on the judge dependent elements and this requirement triggers to resolve the so-called 1st person restriction of ‘-teo-’ sentences.
