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- Title
Towards understanding the syntactic representation of honorifics in Korean.
- Authors
Pak, Miok D.
- 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 the subject honorific in the context of the nature of honorifics in general, including the addressee honorific. More specifically, we examine how the honorific is encoded in the grammar by focusing on the embedding of honorifics. Some empirical data show that embedding 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 the honorific/politeness marker in the embedded CP domain. We further claim that this restriction interacts with the subject honorific in such a way that it forces the honorific agreement to take place obligatorily in certain constructions, thereby making the optionality of the subject honorific hold only conditionally and circumstantially.
- Subjects
SYNTAX (Grammar); HONORIFIC (Grammar); KOREAN language; LINGUISTIC politeness; COMPARATIVE grammar
- Publication
Korean Linguistics, 2015, Vol 17, Issue 2, p132
- ISSN
0257-3784
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/kl.17.2.01pak