Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Honorifics in Korean appear as verbal inflections and havebeen considered as markers of politeness. This study inves-tigates the pragmatic effects of honorifics, and suggests thathonorifics can contribute to the semantic interpretation of verbphrases in complex ways. Native Korean speakers reporteddifferent inferred meanings of “did very well” and “did verypoorly” based on the normative or non-normative honorificforms. We found significant effects of non-normative hon-orifics in positive assessments: over-polite honorifics broughtnegative interpretations. This suggests that pragmatic listen-ers interpret utterances based on the interaction between lit-eral meanings, honorifics, and the normativity of the hon-orifics within a relationship context, to obtain an estimate ofthe speaker’s intended meaning. This is inconsistent with theprevious explanations of honorific usage as discernment or vo-litional politeness. We suggest that non-literal meaning infer-ences reflect listeners treating the honorifics as signals to po-tential communicative goals.