A Note on Subject Honorification in Korean

Abstract

Namai (2000) argues that Japanese subject honorification is not a syntactic agreement phenomenon, based on some observations such as honorific coordination or reciprocal licensing. In this squib, using Korean subject honorification, we show that Namai's arguments do not carry over to Korean, where a syntactic analysis is called for. Specifically, we propose that a functional category H is an honorific-phi probe, and that subject honorification happens when the honorific verbal si in H triggers agreement with a nominal referent in Spec of vP.