Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper argues that Korean suppletive subject honorification is licensed by adjacency between a verbal root and AgrS[+hon] within a single complex head. The proposal addresses an apparent counterexample from auxiliary verb constructions, where suppletive honorification appears on the lexical verb while the regular honorific suffix -(u)si surfaces after the auxiliary. Building on Generalized Reduplication (Arregi and Pietraszko 2021a,b), I propose that AgrS is base-generated adjacent to the lexical root, thereby licensing suppletion, and is subsequently displaced postsyntactically to satisfy a Korean morphotactic constraint requiring AgrS to follow all roots in the complex head. This analysis derives the auxiliary pattern without abandoning an adjacency-based locality condition. It also preserves the contrast with passive and causative constructions, in which intervening verbal morphology blocks suppletion. The resulting account unifies the distribution of regular and suppletive subject honorification and supports a strictly local theory of contextual allomorphy.