Towards understanding the syntactic representation of honorifics in Korean

Abstract

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 syntax of Basque allocutive clitics

“…A question unaddressed in the preceding discussion is how the syntax of Basque allocutive forms compares with that of other languages described in the literature, including Galician (Carbón Riobóo 1995;Longa & Lorenzo 2001;Huidobro 2009), Korean (Pak 2017;Portner et al to appear), and Magahi (Verma 1991;Bhattacharya 2016). The analysis above leads straightforwardly to the expectation that allocutive forms in these languages will have properties shared by thematic addressees.…”

The Morphosyntax of Magahi Addressee Agreement

“…The second remark is on the nature of honorificity agreement. There is a debate in the literature, based on work in Korean and Japanese (see Harada 1976, Boeckx & Fumikazu 2004, Potts & Kawahara 2004, Bobaljik & Yatsushiro 2006, Sells & Kim 2007, Miyagawa 2012, Pak 2015, Miyagawa 2017), as to whether honorification is fundamentally an agreement relation. Magahi data show that it is syntactic.…”

“…This phenomenon is referred to in the literature as allocutive agreement (the term is due to Bonaparte 1862) or addressee agreement (Verma 1991) and has been studied in a number of languages: see Verma 1991 on Magahi; Oyharçabal 1993 on Basque; Miyagawa 2012, 2017 on Japanese; Antonov 2015 on Pumé, Nambikwara, Mandan, and Beja; Pak 2015 on Korean; Zu 2015a, 2015b on Jingpo; Bhattacharya 2016 on Maithili, Magahi, Angika, and Kurmali; Kaur 2017 on Punjabi; McFadden 2017 on Tamil; Haddican 2018 on Galician; and Portner, Pak & Zanuttini 2019 on Korean. This article uses the term addressee agreement —henceforth, AA.…”

On the syntax of addressee in imperatives: insights from allocutivity

“…Only a phi-feature matching subjunctive verb form is permitted in such sentences. Secondly, standard imperatives can be used in mottos and public orders -contexts which lack an interlocutor-addressee that the speaker is directly talking to (Pak 2015;Portner et al 2019). Consider the standard imperative used as a motto in (34) and as a general public order in (36).…”

“…The division in (non)-specific addressee uses seen in Punjabi imperatives is not unique and has been discussed for Korean imperatives (Pak 2015;Portner et al 2019). Korean is an allocutive language which encodes the speaker's relation with the addressee via speech style particles/SSPs (Martin 1992;Sohn 1999;Kim-Renaud & Pak 2006;Pak 2015). The language has six SSPs: formal, polite, semiformal, familiar, intimate, and plain.…”