한국어 담화표지어 ‘예’의 의미

The Pragmatics of the Discourse Particle yey in Korean

The purpose of this paper is to give a pragmatic and sociocultural description of the discourse particle (DP) yey yes in Korean. From a sociocultural perspective, a variety of discourse functions of yey are analyzed as a product of high-context communication strategies, which put interactional relationships before information delivery. For a pragmatic analysis, following Lee(1996, 1997, 1999, 2008), I assume that the DP yey has one basic sense of the speaker s positive attitude, and demonstrate that all the pragmatic uses of the DP can be inferred from the basic sense in accordance with the Gricean Cooperative Principle; all the pragmatic uses are broadly categorized into 2 groups, informative functions and politeness function.