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.