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.

A considerable amount of literature on NPIs has taken syntactic/semantic approaches to identify their licensing environments. However, adverb NPIs in Korean reveal their own idiosyncratic distributational behaviors which the previous analyses cannot explain. Their behaviors reflect the speaker`s different attitudes about the event/situation he is describing. So any appropriate theory of NPIs should be able to account for such pragmatic functions to predict their properties correctly. For this purpose, we classify adverb NPIs into 4 types according to their distributional behaviors in rhetorical questions, and we describe their pragmatic functions; this pragmatic analysis gives a good account of why the 4 types of Adverb NPIs show different distributions in different sentence constructions.