Abstract
Korean is known to have a well-developed honorification system, which is observed to be composed of strategic as well as normative honorification rules. Given this, how to treat the so-called hearer honorific si, which is to honor the hearer, not to honor the subject NP predicated with the verb with si, has been a quite controversial issue in recent years. National Institute of Korean Language and the media are labeling this usage, which is mostly observed in the service context, as a serious language misuse. In contrast, quite a few Korean linguists analyze it as a strategic usage extended from the Korean honorification system. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to reinvestigate whether it is a legitimate usage or an overuse of honorifics. The results of a survey that has been conducted to provide an answer to the issue shows that this is a quite complicated phenomenon, but that Korean language users seem to maintain a quite clear intuition on the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate uses of honorification. It will be proposed that the licensing of si is scalar, which should be accounted for by the direct link between the predication with si and a human NP.
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