한국어의 상대 높임법

Remarks on Addressee Honorification in Korean

It is well known that in Korean, the position of politeness markers on the sentence final endings varies according to formality: the politeness marker yo occurs just after the informal sentence final endings, while one of the formal politeness markers supni, o, i occurs within the formal sentence final endings. A question that arises naturally is what this positional difference is due to. We argue, in this squib, that the informal sentence final enders, most of which come from connective enders, don t have a selectional feature for the formal politeness markers. This is why a different politeness marker, i.e. yo, is used for the informal sentence final endings, and occurs not within, but after them. We also argue that every politeness marker, regardless of whether formal or informal, is base-generated in the head of CP with an uninterpretable politeness feature, and that it has a different morpho-phonological form as a result of feature-checking with a vocative in Spec, SAP.