Korean Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2015

One of the salient features of the Korean language is honorifics. Two kinds of honorifics have been discussed in the literature, subject honorific and addressee honorific. The subject honorific is characterized by honorific markers on the subject and predicate. The addressee honorific is usually marked by formal and/or polite speech style particles at the end of a sentence. The subject honorific is characterized by its optionality which has raised many questions about its nature, whether it is a type of formal feature agreement or not. The addressee honorific, however, has not received much attention from a theoretical perspective in the literature though much descriptive work is available. In this paper, we attempt to discuss the optionality of subject honorific in the context of the nature of honorifics in general, including the addressee honorific. More specifically, we examine how honorific is encoded in the grammar by focusing on embedding of honorifics. Some empirical data show that embedding of honorifics (or politeness) is restricted in certain constructions. Based on examining these constructions, we claim that there is a generalization that prohibits the occurrence of honorific/politeness marker in the embedded CP domain. We further claim that this restriction interacts with subject honorific in such a way that it forces the agreement of honorific to take place obligatorily in certain constructions, thereby making the optionality of the subject honorific to hold only conditionally and circumstantially.

The aim of the present paper is to revisit earlier studies on the evolution of Korean honorifics and, following a brief survey of the contemporary system, (a) overview the historical development of Korean honorific patterns from Old Korean to Contemporary Korean and (b) propose to account, on a principled basis, for the evolutional processes in the framework of grammaticalization. I assume that Korean honorifics have evolved due essentially to the three interdependent language/culture-specific forces: structural, socio-cultural, and interactional, as directed by the language-universal principles and processes of grammaticalization. The essence of the structural forces is the agglutinative, predicate-final, and head-final morpho-syntactic nature of Korean. This typological salience is a crucial condition under which honorific affixes and particles may be germinated. Socio-cultural forces include the Korean people’s traditional and contemporary socio-cultural systems, values, and norms of hierarchism and collectivism, as language is regarded as reflecting culture and society. Koreans’ hierarchism and collectivism are sufficiently manifested in the structure and use of the language (e.g. H. Sohn 1986). The interactional forces are Koreans’ society/culture/context-bound interpersonal language use for communicative purposes. These three interlocking forces are assumed to have motivated and sustained a dynamic set of addressee and referent honorific contrasts in Korean, which have evolved as driven by the universal principles and processes of grammaticalization.

The use of honorifics in Korean and Japanese is generally dictated by social factors such as age, status, and gender (Sohn 1999, Kuno 1987). Honorifics are marked by a well-defined repertoire of linguistic elements, including address-terms, specialized vocabulary, and verbal suffixes. Depending on the relationship between the interlocutors, an honorific form is chosen over the other available forms. Recently, researchers have been questioning whether the choice is wholly dependent on the relative status, or if other factors play a role in the selection process (Strauss and Eun 2005, Dunn 2005, Yoon 2015). This study focuses on the honorifics productively encoded by verbal suffixes. Unexpectedly, continual shifts between verbal suffixes are observed in a single speech situation. Based on the analyses of media data, we identify a set of social meanings encoded by these shifts. Furthermore, we show that Silverstein’s notion of “indexical order” (Silverstein 2003) is crucial for accounting for suffix alternation.

Traditional research on Korean honorifics has tended to assume that these forms have fixed meanings such as deference and respect. In this paper, I argue that such meanings only represent the most prototypical and normative expressive meanings of honorific forms. By surveying recent pragmatics and sociolinguistic research, I show how honorifics can communicate a variety of context-specific affective meanings. Some of these meanings, such as sarcasm and factuality, are very distant from the presumption that honorifics are markers of deference. In addition to affective meanings, I also argue that honorifics have social meanings. In other words, when speakers use honorifics, these forms communicate something about the speaker’s own identity. Someone who uses honorifics well may be perceived as educated, well-bred and even as a “good” Korean. Finally, I discuss how honorifics are tied up with gendered meanings in Korean speech and how phonetics may be playing a role.