Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

The purpose of this thesis is to study the honorific expressions in Korean. Honorific expressions in Korean grammatically display some relationship among subject, object, hearer and speaker in sentences. In the Honorific expressions in Korean, 'Hearer honorific expression' uses lexical, inflectional...

The purpose of this thesis is to study the honorific expressions in Korean. Honorific expressions in Korean grammatically display some relationship among subject, object, hearer and speaker in sentences. In the Honorific expressions in Korean, 'Hearer honorific expression' uses lexical, inflectional, derivational method in order to honor hearers. Since a hearer honorific expression is realized with complexity and influenced by language external effects, some scholars suggested many different opinions about that. To achieve this thesis's aim, I make a general survey of previous study in the first place. Then I raise questions about two issues. The first one is that the hearer honorific expression is not only a domain of grammar. And the second one is that we must deviate from custom of speech level-centered study which was based on 'high and low' concepts. The honorific expressions in Korean are generally classified into three types. That is, 'Subject honorific expression', 'Object honorific expression' and 'Hearer honorific expression'. 'Subject honorific expression' is the grammar to honor a subject referent in a sentence. And 'Object honorific expression' is the grammar to honor a object referent in a sentence. And 'Hearer honorific expression' is the grammar to honor a hearer. In these three types, 'Hearer honorific expression' has peculiar complexity. This hearer honorific expression in Korean can be realized as three methods - lexical, morphological and grammatical. A lexical method uses honorific words such as 'cane(=you)', 'dangsin(=you)', 'nu'(=you)', 'ya(=you)'. Morphological method adds suffixes such as '-ssi', '-nim', '-kun' to a vocative. And a grammatical method adds endings such as '-eup-nita', '-ra', '-yo' to a predicate. To deal successfully with two issues which were proposed introductory part of this thesis, we study the grammatical characteristics and pragmatical characteristics of hearer honorific expressions separately. When we surveying the hearer honorific expression grammatically, it is the concord relation between the vocative and the precative. In all sentences with hearer honorific expression, the vocative can be supposed, and the features of the vocative agree with the features of the precative. On the other hand, the features of hearer honorific expression are given pragmatically in the discourse, while 'gender', 'number', 'case' of Indo-European languages are given naturally by the world. So we need pragmatical analysis to make clear this feature. Because 'person', 'honor intention', 'situation factor' are essential conditions of realizing hearer honorific expressions, it can be explained that [±high person], [±honor], [±fomal] are three features of the vocative and precative of hearer honorific expressions. The feature [±high person] indicates whether a hearer is in higher place(age, social position etc.) compared with a speaker. The feature [±honor] indicates whether a speaker has intention to honor a hearer. And the feature [±formal] indicates whether a speaker and a hearer are in formal situation. The vocative and the precative are endowed with this three features. In conclusion, the hearer honorific expression in Korean must be explained by united principle which combined with pragmatical and grammatical method together.

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