• Language and Information
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.25-49
• /
• 2016

Honorific forms express the speaker's social attitude to others and also indicate the social ranks and level of intimacy of the participants in the discourse. In a cross-linguistic perspective of grammar engineering, modelling honorification has been regarded as a key strategy for improving language processing applications. Using the HPSG and MRS formalism, this article provides a multilingual grammar model of honorification. The present study incorporates the honorific information into the Meaning Representation System (MRS) via Individual Constraints (ICONS), and then conducts an evaluation to see if the model contributes to semantics-based language processing.

• Language and Information
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.19-36
• /
• 2015

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.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
• /
• v.9B no.6
• /
• pp.817-826
• /
• 2002

In Korean dialogue honorification phenomenon may occur, an honorific pronoun may be used, and a subject or an object may be completely omitted when it can be recovered based on context. This paper proposes that in order to process Korean dialogue in which such distinct linguistic phenomena occur and to construct its representation structure we mark and use the following information explicitly, not implicitly : information about dialogue participants, information about the speech act of an utterance, information about the relative order of social status for the people involved in dialogue, and information flow among utterances of dialogue. In addition, this paper presents a method of marking and using such situational information and an appropriate representation structure of Korean dialogue. In this paper we set up Korean dialogue representation structure by modifying and extending DRT (Discourse Representation Theory) and SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory). Futhermore, this paper shows how to process Korean dialogue computationally and construct its representation structure by using Prolog programming language, and then applies such representation structure to spontaneous Korean dialogue to know its validity.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
• /
• 2007.11a
• /
• pp.340-348
• /
• 2007

This paper deals with the complex verb formation of passive and potential predicates and syntactic structures projected by these verbs. Though both predicates are formed with the suffix -rare which has been assumed to originate from the same stem, they show significantly different syntactic behaviors. We propose two kinds of concatenation of base verbs and auxiliaries; passive verbs are lexically formed with the most restrictive mode of combination, while potential verbs are formed syntactically via more flexible combinatory operations of function composition. The difference in the mode of complex verb formation has significant consequences for their syntactic structures and semantic interpretations, including different combination with the honorific morphemes and subjectivization of arguments/adjuncts of base verbs. We also consider the case alternation phenomena and their implications for scope construals found in potential sentences, which can be accounted for in a unified manner in terms of the optional application of function composition.