HONORIFICATION IN KOREAN AS EXPRESSIVE MEANING

Peter Sells and Jong-Bok Kim


Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Program



Honorification in Korean elevates the social status of a participant in a clause with respect to the subject and/or the hearer. There are various kinds of honorific marking -- an honorific suffix for nouns, special honorific forms of nouns, honorific case particles, honorific marking on verbs, and special honorific forms of verbs. The example in (1) illustrates:

(1)
moksa-nim-kkeyse ku malssum-ul ha-si-ess-upni-ta
pastor-Hon-Hon.Subj that word(Hon)-Acc do-Hon-Past-Polite-Decl
"The pastor said that (those words)."

Previous accounts have mainly taken the information carried by honorific forms to be a featural specification [HON +], or something equivalent, while unmarked forms are either [HON -], or perhaps [HON unspecified].

Our key idea is that honorific forms introduce a dimension of meaning -- expressive meaning (Potts 2005) -- which is privative, and hence simply absent from all non-honorific forms. Building on the account (of Japanese) in Potts & Kawahara (2004), our paper goes beyond their empirical claims, and also presents a slightly different formal analysis.

All previous accounts fall foul of three rather easily-identified facts: first, the different expressions of 'honorification' do not mean exactly the same thing. Second, multiple expressions of honorific marking within the same clause progressively elevates the social status of the referent -- the effect is cumulative, not identificatory. For instance, example (1) is very honorific, due to the several honorific forms, and is not merely instantiating agreement to some [HON +] specification.

Third, though related to the first point, some nouns have to be given a spurious and ultimately inconsistent ambiguity, under an agreement analysis. The noun "nwukwu" means 'who' and optionally appears with an honorific form of the verb. This might suggest an optional [HON +] on "nwukwu":

(2)
nwukwu-ka o(-si)-ess-ni
who-Nom come(-Hon)-Past-Q
"Who came?"

However, "nwukwu" cannot host the nominal markers "-nim" or "-kkeyse" seen in (1), so it appears to have no internal honorific status at all -- as would be expected from the morphology, which is definitely unmarked with respect to honorific marking.

The discrepancy here is rooted in the the fact that the nominal markers elevate the referent with respect to the speaker, while the verbal honorific markers elevate the referent with respect to the hearer. The speaker cannot elevate above him- or herself someone whose identity is unknown. The formal analysis follows Potts and Kawahara in that honorific forms place contraints on context, such that each participant must be specified for an honorific relation to the speaker and hearer, where the default is 0 (no specified relation), with positive values ranging over a continuous numerical scale to allow for the cumulative effect of honorific marking. There are also constraints on context which govern the relative social elevation of the hearer and the speaker, which may be indirectly signalled via honorific forms.