우회적 요청 구문의 화용적 선호도에 대한 코퍼스 기반 연구:인터뷰 문맥을 중심으로

Lee, Sang-Geun. 2014. A Corpus-based Study on Pragmatic Preference for theIndirect Requests with CAN over WILL in Public Interview Settings. English Language and Linguistics 20.3, 59-77. This study analyzes the usage patterns of two indirect interrogative request formats with CAN and WILL retrieved from the corpora of spoken American English (COCA), to investigate the speaker’s pragmatic preference for a form of indirect request over the other, in terms of entitlement to request. I pay special attention to the public interviewing settings, where the professional interviewer (or requester) typically feels sure of high entitlement to request, to identify the type of speech act verbs used in each format as well as the frequency of each format. The results indicate that the speaker prefers the CAN-indirect request format for routine tasks with high entitlement endowed, while (s)he prefers the WILL-indirect request for non-routines with low entitlement.This study is all the more meaningful in that it appeals to a self-oriented (entitlement) analysis, rather than an other-oriented (politeness) analysis, to promote a more balanced perspective on the speaker’s pragmatic preference for one format of indirect request over the other.