Revisiting "polite" -yo and "deferential" -supnita speech style shifting in Korean from the viewpoint of indexicality

This article revisits the question of why Korean speakers switch between two different speech styles ("polite" -yo and "deferential" -supnita) in public speech. Although two recent articles (Eun and Strauss, 2004; Strauss and Eun, 2005) have approached this problem, their explanations that -yol-supnita shifting is grounded in the marking of information status and the indexing of stances of inclusion/exclusion have some underlying problems, which I address in the opening sections. I then analyze a Korean talk show to arrive at a more appropriate model for describing -yol-supnita shifting. The data shows that participants in this talk show use -supnita as a resource for indexing presentational and performative stances of authority and to mark talk as public or ritualistic. From this, I posit that the underlying direct indexical meaning of -supnita is "formal presentational stance." Although -yo tends to occur in more casual and emotionally unrestrained sequences of the talk show, I argue that affective stances are only indirectly indexed by this form when it occurs in opposition to -supnita in public speech. Crucially, these affective meanings are mediated by the co-occurrence of -yo with interactional particles. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.