Basic properties of honorific agreement

Subject agreement

Honorification, one of the main features of spoken language in Korean, plays a key role in proper and successful verbal communication (Chang 1996, Sohn 1999, Kim and Sells 2008b, Kim 2011). The Korean honorific system basically requires that when the subject is in the honorific form (usually with the marker -nim), the predicate also be inflected with the honorific form -(u)si, as in (1a):

Examples like (1a) are most natural in the sense that the subject agrees with the matrix verb in terms of honorification. However, those like (1b), where there is disagreement between the two, may be used when the speaker does not honor the referent of the subject (marked by #).

Considering that agreement disconcord can be used in a limited context, one may assume honorific agreement in Korean is purely pragmatic. This pragmatic direction has led literature to assume that using the -nim and -si form of verbs is a matter of gradience and appropriateness rather than grammaticality (see, among others, Pollard and Sag 1994, Chang 1996, Lee and Ramsey 2000, Aarts 2007). However, one key property that has often been ignored is that honorific agreement must be observed when the subject is non-human, as illustrated by the examples in (2) (Sohn 1999, Kim 2011):

If we rely only on pragmatic information, we would have difficulties understanding why, unlike the disagreement data in (1b), disagreement cases like (2) are hardly found in real language usages.