Grammatical Interfaces in Korean Honorification: A Constraint-based Perspective

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties in languages like Korean, playing a pivotal role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computational applications such as spoken language translation and generation. This paper shows that departing from previous literature, an adequate analysis of Korean honorification needs to involve a system that has access not only to morpho-syntax but to semantics and pragmatics as well. Along these lines, this paper offers a constraint-based HPSG analysis of Korean honorification in which the enriched lexical information tightly interacts with syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels for the proper honorific system.