THE SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC NATURE OF HONORIFIC AGREEMENT IN KOREAN:A CONSTRAINT-BASED APPROACH

This paper is an HPSG approach to agreement phenomena involving the Korean honorific expressions. it is shown that the theoretical devices developed by the constraint-based theory of HPSG can be fruitfully used to capture the interactions between syntactic constraints and semantic of pragmatic factors in Korean honorific agreement. The HPSG's semantic feature 'referential index' plays a key rele in discribing the multiple interaction. The constraint-based theory of agreement proves successful in accounting for the phenomenon that may be called 'inconsistent' honorific agreement as well as 'consistent' regular honorific usages. However, this paper acknowledges its limit. Recognizing an important distinction between basic and 'coercive' honorific expressions, it is argued that a systactic-semantic-pragmatic approach such as the present one can only be applied to basic honorific agreement. Being sociolinguistic in nature, coercive honorific agreement is perhaps not amenable to formal linguistic investigation.