Deep Processing of Honorification Phenomena in a Typed Feature Structure Grammar

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties of languages like Korean or Japanese, playing an important role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computational applications such as spoken language translation and generation. We argue that, contrary to the previous literature, an adequate analysis of Korean honorification involves a system that has access not only to morphosyntax but to semantics and pragmatics as well. Along these lines, we have developed a typed feature structure grammar of Korean (based on the framework of HPSG), and implemented it in the Linguistic Knowledge Builder System (LKB). The results of parsing our experimental test suites show that our grammar provides us with enriched grammatical information that can lead to the development of a robust dialogue system for the language. 1 Basic Properties of Honorific Agreement Honorification, one of the main features of spoken language in Korean, plays a key role in proper and successful verbal communication (Chang 1996, Lee 1998, Sohn 1999). The Korean honorific system basically requires that when the subject is in the honorific form (usually with the marker -nim), the predicate also be inflected with the honorific form -(u)si as in (1):1 (1) a. sensayng-nim-i wus-usi-ess-e. teacher-HON-NOM laugh-HON-PST-DECL ‘The teacher laughed.’ b.#sensayng-nim-i wus-ess-e. This type of agreement is often assumed to be purely pragmatic, mainly because certain contexts allow disagreeing cases between the subject and the verb: the utterance of (1)b can be felicitous when the speaker does not honor the referent of the subject (marked by #). The possibility of having such disagreement has often to an assumption in the literature that using the -nim and -si form of verbs is a matter of gradience and appropriateness rather than grammaticality (cf. Chang 1996, Pollard and Sag 1994, Lee 1998). However, one often neglected fact is that this agreement constraint must be observed when the subject is non-human as in (2) (cf. Sohn 1999): (2) a. cha-ka o-(*si)-ess-e. cha-NOM come-HON-PST-DECL ‘The car came.’ b. kwukhoy-ka pepan-ul simuy-ha-(*si)-ess-e. congress bill review-HON-PST-DECL ‘The congress reviewed the bill.’ If we rely only on pragmatic information, we would have difficulty understanding why, in contrast to the disagreement in (1)b, disagreement like that in (2) are rarely found in real language usages. Abbreviations we use in the paper include ARG (ARGUMENT), ACC (Accusative), BAKGR (BACKGROUND), COMP (Complementizer), CTXT (CONTEXT), DECL (Declarative), HON (Honorific), IMPER (Imperative), NOM (Nominative), ORTH (ORTHOGRAPHY), PST (Past), SYN (SYNTAX), SEM (SEMANTICS), RELS (RELATIONS), and POS (part of speech).