Hong, Se-Il. 1997. Pragmatic Function of Questions: Their Illocutionary Forces and Social Hierarchy. Studies in Modern Grammatical Theories, 11: 143-161. Questioning is a speech act which affect the way of conveying meaning and the meaning of questions must be partly dependent of rules governing social relationships. The primary purpose of this paper is to show the relationship between the pragmatic functions of questions and social hierarchy between speaker and listener. Three oral corpus of English and two TV drama scripts of Korean were examined and three different kinds of relationship (intimacy, authority, social distance) were assumed. The findings are as follows: 1) Questions can be classified in the modes of their pragmatic function: information questions, examination questions, rhetorical questions, requests, statements. 2) According to the English data, when information is requested, we have the expression of immediate concern. The function of examination questions is to control the respondent`s knowledge, while questions of indirect requests function as requests. Formality characterizes the use of questions of indirect requests and social relationships the use of rhetorical questions. 3) Korean data show that social hierarchy influences more heavily on the speaker`s discourse strategies in choosing the mode of questions. < Table 2 > manifests that information is easily obtained by friends or close family members, while it is rarely or indirectly obtained by senior members or authority figures.

• 홍세일 | Se Il Hong