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Shibatani (2006) states that whereas every language appears to have ways of expressing Politeness, only certain languages have well-developed Honorifics. This has been a long-sustained idea in the theory of Politeness and Pragmatics. More recently, Kashyap (2008), while discussing Bajjika spoken by 20 million people in the northern area of India, proposes that although every language adopts some strategy to make the language sound honorific or polite and not offensive, there be a clear distinction between polite utterances and honorific ones. This paper discusses the relationship between Honorifics and Politeness from a syntactic point of view. More specifically, how is Politeness grammatically and syntactically manifested in two languages, English and Korean if Politeness is a pragmatic universal? Based on Shibatani (2006) and Kashyap (2008), the present study argues that English and Korean Honorifics look radically different from each other from the superficial level and yet the dramatic difference should be attributed to the choice of domain(s) of the Honorifics Encoding via a feature checking mechanism. In particular, a feature-based theory of Honorifics originally proposed in Hong (2010,2011) is advocated and further extended in this paper so that the asymmetry in the manifestation of “rich” honorifics in Korean vs. “meager” honorifics in English can be uniformly accounted for. In conclusion, Korean Honorifics with [±Hon] feature is checked in the domain of DP, vP, and ForceP, and English Honorifics with [±Hon]feature is checked within CP (or ForceP) only. The checking mechanism employed in the current paper, of course, comes not from the early version of Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993, 1995) in which the checking is between Spec-Head relations. Rather, this paper adopts the feature checking systems of Adger (2003, 2006, 2007) and Adger &Svenonius(2010), which means the checking feature is under Sisterhood. The difference in the number of the domains for checking [±Hon] feature between Sisterhood yields the discrepancy of the surface picture of the two languages; a “rich” Honorfic language vs. a “meager” Honorific language, just like a rich inflectional language vs a meager inflectional language.
