한국어 약속 화행에 대한 고찰

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify that the Korean promissive speech act constitutes an independent type of speech act and to examine its defining characteristics and how it is manifested. This discussion builds on previous arguments in the literature that suggested the promissive speech act as a standalone act. To this end, the study analyzed discourse about promises extracted from drama scripts, which represent quasi-spoken language, to investigate how contemporary native Korean speakers express promises. It also reviewed the semantic features and manifestation patterns of the promissive speech act in discourse contexts. The results indicate that the direct form of the promissive speech act in contemporary spoken Korean is typically realized through the phrases ‘-(으)ㄹ게(요)’ and ‘-겠습니다’. Utterances using these forms to express a promise preserved the morphological and syntactic features that are characteristic of promissive sentence. This study found that the communicative purpose of the promissive speech act is not only to convey the speaker’s intention to act but also to influence the listener by encouraging changes in their thoughts or behaviors.