Korean is rather unique in terms of politeness and phonetic cues, since it not only has specific morphemes to indicate politeness, but also prefers to lower F0 rather than raise it, in contrast to the cross-linguistic tendency. This study proposes dividing Korean politeness into three subcategories and examines how hyperdeference, a unique feature of Korean politeness, is realized at the phonetic level. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences that systematically varied for ±deference, ±politeness, and ±formality. In Experiment 2, they read sentences with or without hyperdeferent morphemes, i.e., ±hyperdeference. After recording, participants judged the grammaticality and naturalness of the hyperdeferent sentences. The results of Experiment 1 showed that different phonetic cues were used to express each of the three categories. This suggests that politeness in Korean should be divided into at least three subcategories. The results of Experiment 2 showed that + hyperdeference sentences differed in phonetic cues compared to −hyperdeference ones. This pattern held even among participants who judged the hyperdeferent sentences ungrammatical and/or unnatural. These findings indicate that in Korean, hyperdeference interacts not only on the syntactic level but also at the phonetic level.
Bak et al. (Wed,) studied this question.