Dimensions of honorific meaning in Korean speech style particles

Abstract

In this paper we analyze a set of sentence final particles in Korean that express information on clause type and on the relation between speaker and addressee. Our focus is the latter type of information, known as speech style; we argue that it involves two distinct dimensions, hierarchy and formality. Hierarchy expresses the respective position of speaker and addressee relative to a scale based on a certain social relation (for example, boss-subordinate). We argue that formality is a way of classifying the social relation that forms the basis, or source, for the hierarchical relation. We extend the participant structure analysis of hierarchy from Portner, Pak, and Zanuttini (2019) to capture formality in a way that explains not only how the two dimensions are distinct, but also how they are related.

Keywords

• speech style
• honorifics
• hierarchy
• formality