Directive strategies in modern Korean and Japanese: With special reference to commands and requests

The current study discusses the use of directive strategies in Modern Korean and Japanese, commands and requests in particular. Directives constitute a very basic way in which tasks and activities of everyday life are organized. For both Korean and Japanese, a considerable amount of research has been undertaken on this speech act. However, no study has sufficiently explored the issue of directives in the two languages from a contrastive perspective, despite its significance for understanding the differences between the two languages in interacting with other people in daily life. The current study aims at identifying the linguistic resources that are available for commands and requests in Korean and Japanese, the factors that determine the choice of a particular directive strategy and the (dis)similarities in the use of the directive strategies between the languages. Based on data from Korean and Japanese TV drama series, the study looks into the frequency of various linguistic forms for commands and requests and shows that Korean directive strategies can be characterized as “imperative-honorific-oriented” and Japanese ones as “request-oriented”.