A Contrastive Study On The Honorific Forms In Korean And Chinese

Honorific is a form of expression in languages for a speaker to state the vertical power relation and the horizontal personal relationship between the two parts of a conversation. Korean and Chinese languages differ in linguistic typology, meaning that Korean is an agglutinative language and Chinese is analytic. The great disparities in linguistic forms of honorific expressions, as a result, have brought great troubles for students abroad from both countries in learning the local languages. There has been an inaccurate impression that honorific seems less prolific in expression forms of modern Chinese than it was plentiful in ancient Chinese. The comparative shortage of verbal forms in modern Chinese as honorific has been compensated by newly-emerged syntactical forms and sentence types that never appeared in ancient Chinese.Chinese and Korean are countries of courtesy and honor, and mutual respect is a code to follow in interactions of the two people, which grants the contrast study on the honorific forms of these two languages great significance in both the teaching of Chinese to Koreans and the teaching of Korean to Chinese.The present thesis consists of three parts, sequentially the introduction, the main body and the conclusion.The first chapter functions as the introduction to illustrate the aims and significance of this study and to specify the methods and corpus sources adopted in this paper.The second chapter reviews and analyzes the current progression and issues to address. In the past, the study on Korean honorific had an early start, with copious harvest, whereas the study on Chinese honorific was less active. The previous studies on honorific of both languages have been focusing on the lexical and syntactical layers, so have the few studies contrasting the two languages. The present study goes beyond the lexical and syntactical level to pragmatic fields.The third chapter discusses the definition of honorific in Korean and Chinese and delimits the range of research. Terminologies in Korean expressing honorific manners includes (?)(敬语法),(?)(恭待法),(?)(尊待法), and (?) (?) (尊敬法), etc. In Chinese, there are 敬语,礼貌语,委婉语,etc. Korean terms share a similar domain, while Chinese terms differ in the scope of connotations.敬语 refers to linguistic expression forms and means to show respect to the other, while礼貌语言shows the communicative competence of language when engaging in an social intercourse with others. Therefore, the semantic domain of礼貌语言is larger than 敬语, meaning礼貌语言encompasses敬语.委婉语appears as a substitutive forms of禁忌语,but from a broader perspective, these two concepts perform the same pragmatic function of expressing the intentions in interactions in an indirect way, where these two concepts overlap.The fourth chapter organizes and analyses the lexical forms of Korean and Chinese honorifics. The contrasts of the forms in these two languages could be ascribed into seven categories:first, honorific forms of pronouns; two, honorific forms of general nouns; third, universal appellations as honorific forms; fourth, kinship terminologies as honorific forms; fifth, senior appellations as honorific forms; sixth, official titles, professional titles, positional and diplomatic ranks as honorific forms; and seventh, predicate honorific forms.The fifth chapter addresses the grammars of honorifics in Korean and Chinese. There are mainly two syntactical forms to speak respect to hearers:the formal style and the informal style. In Chinese, reduplicated forms of sentences or words performs the similar functions. As for the display of the honored subjects, syntactical forms are the only way for Koreans to present honored subjects, whereas Chinese employs the imperatives and "请+VP" form. The two languages both resort to verbal forms when the honored subject is ready to receive respect.The sixth chapter explores the pragmatic functions of honorifics in Korean and Chinese. The paper conducts detailed contrastive analysis on each of the three occasions of honorific usage:honoring the hearer, honoring the subject and honoring the object.The seventh chapter serves as the conclusion.