‘je(제)’ has been considered ‘a reflexive pronoun’ so far, but this study defines it as the third person pronoun with the ‘reflexive, emphatic, honorific’ characteristics.
First of all, this study expressed that we had difficulty explaining all kinds of its functions with the existing definition as ‘a reflexive pronoun’. In other words, the existing view limited the object of a reflexive pronoun to ‘a subject of the sentence,’ but in reality ‘je(제)’ has lots of examples referring to the objects existed in ‘discourse context’ or ‘conceptual context’ as well as a subject. Therefore I came to define ‘je(제)’ as ‘the third person pronoun.’ It resulted from the fact that the grammatical category referring to the objects existed in ‘discourse context’ or ‘conceptual context’ is ‘a pronoun,’ and that ‘je(제)’ refers to only ‘the third person pronoun’ of all.
After the argument on these points, I demonstrated that ‘je(제)’ is used as the reflexive usage where the action or state stated by a verb returns to the third person, the emphatic usage emphasizing the action and state, and the honorific usage showing politeness to the third person object.
Thus this study came to a conclusion that ‘je(제)’ is defined as the third person pronoun with the ‘reflexive, emphatic, honorific’ characteristics.