Not just words: Korean social models and the use of honorifics

Abstract

Korean is widely known for its extremely elaborate system of honorification. This paper attempts to capture and articulate Korean cultural scripts about social relationships and associated communicative norms pertinent to the honorific system and in numerous fixed expressions. Relevant components include a “vertical” model of society in which people are commonly thought of as ‘above’ or ‘below’ oneself, a recognised category of revered senior people (Korean noin), and the importance of relative age differences in one-to-one interaction. In addition, the paper tries to articulate the shared understanding behind the existence of honorification as a social practice, namely, that differential usage of words can send specific social messages about how interactants regard each other. The descriptive technique is the cultural scripts approach, using conceptual primes proposed in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory. The cultural scripts are presented in both English and Korean metalanguages. The study demonstrates the possibility of describing cultural values and the related communicative norms in simple terms from an insiders' perspective.