When a third person pronoun means ‘you’: An analysis of Korean tangsin and speaker stance

Abstract

Using naturally-occurring spoken data from the NIKL Daily Conversation Corpus and Spoken Corpus, we examine pragmatic uses of Korean personal pronoun tangsin which is used as a second person address term as well as a third person pronoun. In particular, we focus on how intimacy and honorification affect the (im)polite readings of constructions with second person pronoun tangsin as the subject. Using the Sejong Historical Corpus, we also investigate the development of the personal pronoun tangsin, with special attention to how the third person reflexive developed into the second person pronoun. The findings of this study reveal that politeness is the driving force for its development, and intimacy plays a significant role in determining the (im)politeness readings of second person pronoun tangsin. Our analysis also shows that honorificity (often manifested through the speech level endings accompanying the use of tangsin) also interacts with intimacy to produce (im)politeness readings.