(Inter) Subjectification and Korean honorifics

The traditional diachronic treatment of the Korean honorific marker -sup- is that -sup- was originally used as a referent honorific marker from the subject's point of view. It then underwent changes to become a speaker-addressee-oriented (S-A) marker. Diverging from this traditional approach, I claim, based on a large-scale corpus-based study, that -sup- was used as a speaker-oriented marker as early as the fifteenth century. To account for -sup-'s function change, I posit three stages for the evolution of the modern usage of -sup-. In Stage I (fifteenth century), -sup- was used to establish an honorific relation between a speaker and a referent. In a later transition stage (Stage II, sixteenth century), -sup- began to be used with the contextual restriction that the referent be the same as the addressee. Due to its high frequency, this use of speaker-addressee honorification was coded as a new standard (Stage III). This paper shows that the pragmatic function change of the Korean honorific marker is adequately accounted for by Traugott's (2003, 2007) (inter)subjectification theory.