비격식체 종결어미 ‘아요’와 ‘세요’의 사용 양상 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the patterns of using ‘ayo’ and ‘seyo’ in their spoken corpora under the informal sentence ending ‘haeyo style’ category among the elementary-level Korean grammar items. These two sentence endings are two of the first sentence endings that Korean learners encounter in their early days of study. The frequency of their actual uses is very high in Korean learners' communication. It is thus important that Korean learners should be able to use them for their meanings in proper situations. The field of Korean education needs to provide grammar information according to the use patterns of ‘ayo’ and ‘seyo’ inducing learners' accurate and fluent communication. The study thus examined the semantic functions of ‘ayo’ and ‘seyo’ widely used both in public and private situations including [description], [question], [order] and [request] and compared these two sentence endings in their use patterns as similar grammar items. The results show that both of the sentence endings were used in higher frequency in private situations(69.9%) than public ones(30.1%). Interlocutors used ‘seyo’ more than ‘ayo’ when they had a sense of distance between them in conversations. The study also examined the use patterns of ‘ayo’ and ‘seyo’ as homograph grammar items by the semantic function. While ‘ayo’ recorded the highest frequency of use in [description(75%)], which was followed by [question(14.4%)], [order(10.1%)], and [request(0.23%)] in the order, ‘seyo’ recorded the highest frequency of use in [order(66.9%)], which was followed by [description(27.4%)], [question(5.26%)], and [request(0.3%)] in the order. The findings of the study may serve as basic data to supplement the description of grammar information of ‘ayo’ and ‘seyo’ two informal sentence endings in elementary Korean, as homograph grammar items.