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Politeness Across Cultures pp 106–127Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Korean Honorifics and ‘Revealed’, ‘Ignored’ and ‘Suppressed’ Aspects of Korean Culture and Politeness

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Abstract

Korean is well known for possessing one of the most elaborate honorifics systems observed in the world’s languages. Through the addition of verb endings and vocabulary substitutions the speaker is able to express subtle degrees of deference towards the hearer or sentence referents. At times, this results in sentences of identical referential meaning being rendered in altogether different ways depending on whether the speaker is addressing (or referring to) a status superior (as in 1a) or status equal/ subordinate (1b):1

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Authors
  1. Lucien Brown
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Warwick, UK

    Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini (Honorary Associate Professor) (Honorary Associate Professor)

  2. Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary

    Dániel Z. Kádár (Research Fellow, Associate Professor) (Research Fellow, Associate Professor)

  3. Asia University, Taiwan

    Dániel Z. Kádár (Research Fellow, Associate Professor) (Research Fellow, Associate Professor)

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© 2011 Lucien Brown

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Brown, L. (2011). Korean Honorifics and ‘Revealed’, ‘Ignored’ and ‘Suppressed’ Aspects of Korean Culture and Politeness. In: Bargiela-Chiappini, F., Kádár, D.Z. (eds) Politeness Across Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305939_6

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