‘...Eo Chu(si)myeon ...Gess-’ Construction of Request Speech Acts
Minyoung Lee · Korean Semantics · 2025
This study examined the conditional construction ‘...어 주(시)면 ...겠-’ used for request speech acts in Korean. Syntactically, this construction only allows a second-person noun phrase as the subject in the conditional clause and requires the realization of the pre-final ending ‘-겠- (-gess-)’ in the consequent clause. Semantically, the connective ending ‘-(으)면 (-myeon)’ expresses subjunctive conditionals and can be replaced by ‘-다면 (-tamyeon).’ Furthermore, the predicate of the consequent clause is semantically restricted to those conveying [+state] meanings and indicating situations beneficial to the speaker. Based on these findings, the study also identified English expressions sharing similar semantic characteristics, suggesting the possibility of cross-linguistic universality in conditional constructions used for request speech acts.