An empirical study of honorific mismatches in Korean

Publication date: September 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 75Author(s): Sanghoun Song, Jae-Woong Choe, Eunjeong OhAbstractWhile numerous studies have approached honorification mainly focusing on how honorific forms and features agree with each other in syntactic derivation, the present study focuses on mismatches between a referent and the verb that the referent depends on with respect to honorification. If Korean honorification is a syntactic phenomenon, the mismatches in honorification must be fully accounted for as syntactic agreement cannot be disobeyed in principle. However, either theoretical or empirical inquiry into the mismatches in honorification has not received due attention. Systematic theoretical research on the issue is scant and the empirical endeavors are even rarer. Therefore, the full range of acceptability variance for different honorific expressions remains unknown, which hinders a livelier discussion about honorification. In this context, the present work employs two widely supported methods of linguistic research, viz. acceptability judgment testing and corpus exploration, in order to account for cases of the honorific mismatches. First, the cross-validation reveals that there is no a posteriori evidence for believing that Korean honorification undergoes a syntactic agreement. The experimental results indicate that Korean native speakers largely allow the mismatches involving a referent in an honorific form and a verb in a non-honorific form. Fur...
Source: Language Sciences - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research