There are various indicators which represent a power relation between speakers and hearers. Among them, terms of address signify terms by which a speaker calls a hearer, and they clearly demonstrate the social hierarchy... [ view full abstract ]
There are various indicators which represent a power relation between speakers and hearers. Among them, terms of address signify terms by which a speaker calls a hearer, and they clearly demonstrate the social hierarchy between interlocutors. Moreover, the selection of terms of address indicates how the speaker accepts the hearer in terms of social dynamics such as power and status.
Terms of address often refer to a title or a name. However, they reveal social distances between co-participants. Caki usually refers to speaker-self in the sentence as reflexives. It also indicates 3rd-person pronouns to refer to an aforementioned person or the person in a previous context. Interestingly, Caki is also used in conversation as a 2nd-person pronoun.
In this study, I analyzed SJ-RIKS (Rediscovery of 21st Sejong Modern Korean) corpus, which consists of spoken and written Korean data, totaling approximately 110,000,000 words. The spoken corpus is made up of pure-spoken data and quasi-spoken data. I found more usages in quasi-spoken corpus than the pure-spoken one. This means that 2nd-person pronoun use of Caki is technically ungrammatical but pragmatically acceptable in Korean society.
It has been found that Caki, which is not only a 2nd-person pronoun but also a term of address, is used between lovers (man-woman) in a private context and between a junior and a senior colleague in a professional context (women) based on McCarthy’s (1998) taxonomy. According to Oh (2011), 2nd-person pronouns in English and Korean include the grammatical categories and spatio-temporal indications of discourse covering extralinguistic categories, such as politeness, respect, intimacy, and solidarity, which are social and pragmatic components. In this study, Koreans used 2nd-person pronouns to communicate hierarchical relationships than English speakers do. This finding reflects that strong social distances in Korean society exist compared to American culture (Oh, 2011).
