Audience-blind sentence-enders in Korean: A discourse-pragmatic perspective

In Korean the speaker-addressee relationship is reflected in mandatory sentence-final verbal morphology. It indicates, among other things, the speaker's attitudinal, emotional, epistemic, and evidential stance toward the addressee or proposition, including various honorification levels. The so-called ‘speech-level’ has been grammaticalized to such an extent that any violation of proper honorification would render the utterance not only pragmatically unacceptable but often ungrammatical. There is, however, one distinct style adopting ‘audience-blind forms’ (ABFs), which are used in sentences intended for unspecified audiences and lack such interpersonal grammatical trappings. This paper addresses strategic uses of ABFs in discourse, especially in audience-sensitive contexts. By strategically employing ABFs, the speaker feigns the utterance as monologual, i.e., it is directed to the self, not the addressee. From the viewpoint of discursive strategy, the speaker claims, among others, his/her superiority over the addressee or universal validity of his/her claim. The use of ABFs in audience-sensitive contexts thus shows how language users may opt out of grammatical requirements and strategically employ seemingly inappropriate forms for discursive effect. It is also argued, drawing upon crosslinguistic observations, that audience-blinding is a part of general blinding strategies in language use, which may involve the author and the message as well.