The purpose of this paper is to give a pragmatic and sociocultural description of the discourse particle (DP) ani ``no`` in Korean. From a sociocultural perspective, a variety of discourse functions of ani are analyzed as a product of high-context communication strategies, which put interactional relationships before information delivery. For the pragmatic analysis, following Lee(1996, 2011), I assume that the DP ani has one basic sense that the speaker has a different view, and demonstrate that all the pragmatic uses of the DP can be inferred from the basic sense in accordance with the Gricean Cooperative Principle; different from the previous studies, ani is analyzed not as representing the speaker`s negative attitude, but as a difference-representing DP.

• 이한규(경희대학교) | Han Gyu Lee