Empowering Devices in Korean Honorific Speech Revisited: A Perspective of Pragmatics and Power

초록

Korean honorific expressions usually indicate politeness but it also relates to power between the interlocutors in which power variables such as age, kinship, gender, social status and occupational ranks play an important role in choosing appropriate honorific expressions. This paper reviewed Korean honorific expressions in a perspective of pragmatics and power focusing on how empowering is realized in relation to its power variables. It has been discussed that 1) the use of the polite singular second pronoun, tangsin, tayk, eolusin, instead of neo (you) transfers power to the hear from the speaker, 2) kinship terms eomma (mommy) and appa (daddy) instead of na (I) also empower more authority, 3) professional address terms such as sensayng, sacang by themselves also carry authority, and 4) honorific markers can also carry power to the referents in Korean language. It is concluded that the honorific speech in Korean has been projected to either the speaker, hearer, or the referents in case the relationship between interlocutors and referents is unequal.

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