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영어

The purpose of this paper is to examine the distance principle between the length of forms and social distances in Korean request expressions in terms of Haiman's (1983, 1985) distance principle and Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory. Discourse-functional account including distance principle can explicitly analyze the semantic and pragmatic corresponding relationship in Korean requests. In order to examine the validity of the proposed explanations, this study analyzes electronic mail messages containing various kinds of request sentences in authentic situation. As a result, it is possible to say that there should be a general pattern of language choice in Korean requests: the longer form, the more polite. And this pattern can be more convincing when context and individual variations are considered. Given the fact, iconic relationship can be dealt as a universal tendency and this generality may be extended to other languages