Kang Hyeon-seok. 2012. A Comparative Sociolinguistic Study of Protestant and Buddhist Prayer Texts with a Focus on Sentence Type, Speech Act, and Hearer Honorifics. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 20(2). pp. 1-31. This paper analyzes 180 prayer texts of Protestantism and Buddhism (90 per each), and investigates differences in sentence types, speech acts, and hearer honorifics. More various sentence types were observed in Buddhist prayers than in Protestant prayers. In addition. more declaratives were used in the former, while more imperatives were found in the latter. In Buddhist prayers, speech acts of stating and promising were performed more often, whereas in Protestant prayers petitioning and thanking speech acts were found in a higher proportion. An attempt was made to explain these differences on the basis of different doctrinal and philosophical background of the two religions. Two kinds of analysis of hearer honorifics were conducted in this study: The first was based on the speech levels of different sentence ending styles; the second, a comprehensive analysis, was performed incorporating all the relevant factors in hearer honorification: sentence ending styles, politeness markers ‘-op-’ & ‘-si-’, and the auxiliary verb ‘juda’. The latter analysis proved to be more accurate and could reveal inter-religion differences that the former was not able to disclose. Different patterns of hearer honorifics used in the two religions’ prayer texts were attributed to two distinctly transmitted linguistic subcultures. Two additional phenomena of synchronic and diachronic variation observed in the prayers are also introduced and examined: 1) speech accommodation phenomena (Giles & Ogay 2007) found in the prayers of teachers teaching children in churches and Buddhist temples, 2) ongoing language change in prayer language.

• 강현석(단국대학교)