서비스업 담화에서의 경어법 사용에 대한 사회언어학적 인식 연구

Abstract

This study investigated the use of honorifics in everyday service discourse, focusing on cafés as a sociolinguistic setting. Based on sociolinguistic interviews with 50 café workers, 200 utterances were collected across three common interactional situations: price announcements, drink delivery, and item location guidance. The honorific pre-final ending -si- appeared in only 7.5% of the utterances, suggesting its limited use in practice. Speakers evaluated the use of -si- in terms of grammaticality, discourse context, the naturalness of combining honorific forms, and politeness strategy. Their perceptions were categorized into five types: grammar-based avoidance, relational orientation, sociocultural distancing, context-driven acceptance, and situational selectivity. The use of final endings also varied based on context. In direct delivery situations, speakers were 3.58 times more likely to use polite informal speech (heyoche), indicating that physical proximity and interactive possibility shape linguistic choices. Meanwhile, familiarity with customers interacted with speakers’ professional role awareness and orientation toward maintaining formality, resulting in more complex patterns of final ending use. These findings suggest that Korean honorifics are not merely grammatical rules; they are socially attuned practices shaped by speakers’ strategic and contextual judgments during interactions