본문 바로가기
  • Home

Semantic and Pragmatic Characteristics of Korean Honorific Pronouns

  • Korean Semantics
  • 2011, 36(), pp.449-480
  • Publisher : The Society Of Korean Semantics
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature

CHOE, Jae-Woong 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

According to a representative dictionary of modern Korean, ’The Standard Dictionary of Korean’, there are 472 pronouns in the Korean language, and among them 267 turn out to be marked for honorific function in their definition. Starting from this rather unusually large number of honorification related pronouns in Korean, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the whole data from the semantic and pragmatic point of view. Section 2 discusses some specific methods and criteria for the extraction of the list of honorification related pronouns from the dictionary. In Section 3, an analysis framework is proposed which combines three dimensions of meaning, that is, Referential dimension, Expressive dimension, and Genre dimension. It is claimed that the three-dimensional approach to the meaning of the Korean (anti-)honorific pronouns provides an optimal framework in which most of the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the data can be described appropriately.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.