Korean honorification as a window to understanding animacy

Aidan Katson

Keywords: Korean, honorification, gender, animacy, nominal features

TL;DR: Honorification in Korean is driven by an animacy-based gender feature ELDER, housed on n, adapted from independently argued animacy feature inventories.

Abstract: A component of a successful syntactic theory is an exhaustive but parsimonious feature inventory over which syntactic operations like Agree may apply. There is a tension between empirical adequacy and theoretical simplicity: a unique paradigm might seem to warrant a dedicated feature which does nothing but derive that phenomenon. Such a case is honorification (the grammatical marking of politeness) in Korean. There are two classes of approaches to honorification: syntactic (Koopman 2005, Choi & Harley 2019, Ackema & Neeleman 2018, Portner et al. 2019, Jou 2024) and semantic-pragmatic (Kim & Sells 2007, Kim & Findlay 2023, Song et al. 2019, Wang 2023). Syntactic approaches generally derive honorification via Agree over a bespoke feature like [HON]; one significant challenge levied against such approaches is the ad hoc nature of this feature. I address this serious counterargument by demystifying the identity of [HON], proposing it is an interpretable animacy-based gender feature housed on n, in the sense of Kramer (2015). Further, I suggest it is an already existing feature: I modify a proposal of asymmetrically entailing animacy features, ELDER ⊂ HUMAN ⊂ ANIMATE ⊂ π, which capture animacy-sensitive PCC-like effects in Zapotec (Foley & Toosarvandani 2022, Toosarvandani 2023, Sichel & Toosarvandani 2024), and argue [HON] is simply ELDER. Not only does this bolster existing syntactic approaches to honorification (e.g., Jou 2024), by folding the ad hoc [HON] into independently argued featural systems, but it enriches some feature-based semantic-pragmatic analyses (pace Wang 2023), too. Also, analyzing honorification as animacy-based gender has consequences for the theoretical status of animacy: I demonstrate that animacy in Korean is gender, unlike animacy in Zapotec, which is person.

Submission Number: 220