외국인 대학생의 요청 담화에서의 적극적 공손 전략 실현 양상 연구

A Study on Positive Politeness Strategies of Request Discourse by International Undergraduate Students

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the enactment of positive politeness to perform request functions in Korean as second language (KSL) speakers, with focus on international undergraduate students (IUS), and their native language (L1). Furthermore, this paper aims at comparing their positive politeness strategies (PPS) with Korean native speakers (KNS). IUS’ PPS can be classified as follows: through their utterances in formal letters; using terms of address, promise, optimistic utterance and similarity with the addressee; and giving reasons and background information of the request. This paper shows that IUS’ L1 does not influence PPS usage. IUS use PPS intentionally to mitigate a threat to the receiver’s positive stance in order to accomplish the goal of a request, which is not a specific cultural aspect but a universal communicative strategy applied situationally. IUS’ usage of PPS is similar to KNS. This is explained in terms of IUS’ pragmatic competence, the ability to achieve pragmatic purpose using appropriate strategies as well as KNS. However, when using the wish (blessing) strategy of optimistic utterance and the request strategy of giving reason and background information, IUS focus on form schema rather than content while KNS focus on content in detail to maintain the receiver’s positive stance. (Yeungnam University)