| 초록 |
Choi, Sunghwa. (2019). The inanimate subject honorification of the pre-final ending '-si-' and its strategic usage related to the politeness theory. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 27(4), 37-51. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the acceptability of the emerging phenomenon of the Korean pre-final ending '-si-', in which '-si-' seemingly respects inanimate subjects, with the experimental method widely used in the areas of experimental syntax. In experiment 1, participants rated the acceptability of various sentences, including inanimate subject sentences with or without the honorific marker '-si-'. Results in experiment 1 showed violation effect on the use of '-si-' in sentences with inanimate subjects comparing to human, respectable subjects. This result suggests the possibility that Korean speakers have not accepted this new usage of '-si-' as grammatical. We also tested the hypothesis that the inanimate subject honorific '-si-' is used for pragmatic reasons, specifically, face-saving motives in Brown and Levinson's politeness theory. In experiment 2, the acceptability of the use of '-si-' in inanimate subject sentences in face-threatening contexts is tested. The findings of this experiment show that the ungrammatical usage of the ending '-si-' is likely to be a strategic usage to preserve the face between conversation participants. |
