Honorification as Agree in Korean and beyond

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of the Korean honorification system as agreement. Under the proposed analysis, subject honorification is triggered by an unvalued honorific feature right below T probing downwards to agree with the subject. Addressee honorification is triggered by another instance of the same feature, which probes upwards and agrees with the c-commanding addressee representation. I adopt the bidirectional agreement model (Arregi & Hanink 2021) that enables a unified analysis of both types of honorification. In the second half of the paper, I discuss a crosslinguistic variation among honorification languages. When the subject is 2nd person and thus co-referent with the addressee, Korean and Japanese express honorification of both subject and addressee while Magahi and Tamil actually disallow the co-occurrence – they only allow subject honorification. This crosslinguistic difference can be captured in a straightforward way under my analysis and two well-motivated assumptions: parametric variation in the position of the allocutive probe (Alok 2020; 2021), and an intuitive re-interpretation of Kinyalolo’s Constraint (Kinyalolo 1991; Carstens 2005).