THE IMPACT OF HONORIFIC STRATIFICATION ON THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE ELIDED SUBJECT IN KOREAN

Elision of the subject is a self-regulating linguistic process that aims at reducing the sen-tence depth in regressively shaped languages, like Korean. The loss is partly compensated by the honorific and speech-level stratification. Its impact upon the identification of the omitted subject is limited by several factors some of which will shortly be examined in what follows. 1. One of the conspicuous characteristics of a language is the way of organiz-ing its constitutive elements, particularly on the sentence level. In progressively oriented languages, like English, Russian or, say, Arabic, there are no clearly identifiable limits to the length of a sentence, a fact that can easily be demon-strated on any randomly selected sentence in these languages. Here, there is no such sentence, whatever its length might be, that could not be further expanded. The point may be illustrated on an example quoted by V.H. Yngve (1960): He cried because she hit him because he called her names because she wouldnt give him any candy. It is evident that the sentence would tolerate a practically unlimited number of further expanding elements. The situation is somewhat different in regressively organized languages, lik