This study explores whether (Koreand and English) listeners can discern the deliberate honorific level of Korean utterances even without formal verbal markers, and whether these phonetic cues are cross-linguistically disposable. It is shown that speech acoustics become a significant cue for politeness-linked meanings when listeners can juxtapose utterances voiced by the same speaker. This study shows that politeness does not only abide in verbal markers but is co-denoted by phonetic cues. The results also indicate that some acoustic politeness correlates may be grasped in analogous modes across cultures.