A study on the Usage of Directive Speech Acts of Korean Interrogatives
Interrogative is a type of sentences that conveys a question for people in the process of recognizing the world. Interrogative sentences can reveal not only questions but also various pragmatic meanings such as conjecture, doubt, confirmation, request, command, irony, emphasis, and admiration, etc. The usage patterns of Directive Speech Acts of Korean Interrogatives are studied in this paper. They are commonly used as a syntactic down-grader in order to prevent pragmalinguistic failures and reinforce the effect of utterance in communication. In this research, the aspects of the usage of Directive Speech Acts of Korean Interrogatives by Chinese Korean learner are investigated by methods of Discourse Completion Tests(DCT) and Follow-Up Interview. According to the results comparing between Korean native speaker and Chinese intermediate and advanced Korean learner, we can draw a conclusion that the native speakers use the indirect directive functions of interrogatives actively in order to express their intention effectively and exert the illocutionary force while the Chinese speakers can not use them appropriately.