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    <titleInfo>
        <title>Can language models process linguistic deference?</title>
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        <namePart type="given">Youngdong</namePart>
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            <title>Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026</title>
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            <namePart type="given">Rob</namePart>
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    <abstract>Honorifics are linguistic forms that encode respect toward a socially valued individual or entity. This paper investigates how language models process Korean subject honorifics, which signal the social status of the subject through specific morphological markers. We evaluate a set of language models to determine whether they process honorifics in a human-like way by capturing the socio-pragmatic constraints governing their use, rather than merely relying on surface co-occurrence patterns. Our results indicate a systematic dissociation: models generally succeeded in detecting surface morphosyntactic mismatches, successfully treating unacceptable honorific constructions as less expected. However, models consistently favored overt honorific marking regardless of the subject’s social status, suggesting reliance on surface heuristics over genuine pragmatic knowledge. These findings suggest that language models have not fully acquired the socio-pragmatic constraints underlying honorific use, even when extensively trained on Korean text.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Can language models process linguistic deference?
%A Cho, Youngdong
%A Kwon, Chloe Dokyung
%Y Voigt, Rob
%Y Warstadt, Alex
%Y Feldman, Naomi
%Y Linzen, Tal
%S Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, CA
%@ 979-8-89176-412-5
%F cho-kwon-2026-language
%X Honorifics are linguistic forms that encode respect toward a socially valued individual or entity. This paper investigates how language models process Korean subject honorifics, which signal the social status of the subject through specific morphological markers. We evaluate a set of language models to determine whether they process honorifics in a human-like way by capturing the socio-pragmatic constraints governing their use, rather than merely relying on surface co-occurrence patterns. Our results indicate a systematic dissociation: models generally succeeded in detecting surface morphosyntactic mismatches, successfully treating unacceptable honorific constructions as less expected. However, models consistently favored overt honorific marking regardless of the subject’s social status, suggesting reliance on surface heuristics over genuine pragmatic knowledge. These findings suggest that language models have not fully acquired the socio-pragmatic constraints underlying honorific use, even when extensively trained on Korean text.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.scil-main.35/
%P 369-378

Markdown (Informal)

[Can language models process linguistic deference?](https://aclanthology.org/2026.scil-main.35/) (Cho & Kwon, SCiL 2026)

• Can language models process linguistic deference? (Cho & Kwon, SCiL 2026)

ACL

• Youngdong Cho and Chloe Dokyung Kwon. 2026. Can language models process linguistic deference?. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026, pages 369–378, San Diego, CA. Association for Computational Linguistics.