Toward Understanding Discourse Structure : Flow of Contextual Information in Spoken Korean
Suk-Jin Chang, Jae-Woong Choe · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 1993
A salient feature of spoken Korean is honorification. It is pragmatic in nature, imbued deeply into the grammar and the lexicon of the spoken language. It is grarnmaticalized in the form of sentence endings, reflecting the interpersonal relationship between the speaker and the hearer. Honorification also controls the subject-predicate agreement, constrained by the relationship between the speaker and the subject referent of the utterance. It also partially controls lexical selections. The interpersonal constraints between DPs are three dimensional: social, psychological and formal. There are about half a dozen discourse levels in present-day Korean, each having a distinct sentence ending.