Korean imperatives at two different speech levels: Alternate ways of taking part in others’ actions and affairs

Mary Shin Kim
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Abstract

Korean imperatives are differentiated by speech levels or levels of honorification. Accordingly, most research on Korean imperatives examines them from the perspective of politeness and interpersonal relations. This study takes a different approach, focusing on two types of non-honorific imperative turn design: one with the intimate speech level imperative e/a and the other with the plain speech level imperative ela/ala. Close examination of the forms in naturally occurring conversation provides a clearer picture of when and how the use of these imperatives is warranted by specific interactional configurations and contexts in everyday Korean talk-in-interaction. This study shows that alternate imperatives do not simply index politeness or social status, but are important resources for implementing separate action formats that pursue divergent interactional trajectories.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 6 September 2020

Date accepted: 12 July 2022

Published online: 17 January 2023

Table of contents

Mobilizing others to act is an essential practice in social interaction as people need assistance and cooperation from one another (Taleghani-Nikazm et al. 2020). Imperatives are primordial grammatical forms for mobilizing others to do something. Yet, as Sorjonen, Raevaara, and Couper-Kuhlen (2017, 1–3) pointed out, because imperatives have been viewed mainly as commands and as face-threatening acts that speakers prefer to avoid, pragmatics research has paid less attention to imperatives than to indirect speech acts as ways to mobilize others (Hickey and Stewart 2005). Moreover, the use of imperatives over other forms (e.g., interrogatives) has been mainly discussed in terms of the interlocutors’ social distance and relative power (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; Brown and Levinson 1987), leading to the correlation of imperatives with levels of politeness. This is particularly pertinent for Korean, which has a complex honorific system in which levels of deference, formality or politeness are encoded in grammar and must be marked on the verb (Brown 2015; Sohn 1999).

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