In the past, both teachers and students of languages ​​thought that learning vocabulary and grammar was sufficient.
But in today's world where face-to-face situations are on the rise, this alone is not enough.
Now, a splendid outing into discourse and pragmatics has begun in Korean language education.
This book contains the childish, ups and downs of researchers who are deeply immersed in these concerns.
Of course, the big dream of expanding the boundaries of grammar is contained in those trials and tribulations.

1. Discovering Mistakes and Problems of Korean Learners

Even intermediate to advanced learners who can communicate fluently in Korean often struggle to master the subtle language skills necessary for maintaining interpersonal relationships, making them prone to making numerous mistakes.
These mistakes can lead to misunderstandings and communication barriers, which can negatively impact your ability to maintain positive interpersonal relationships.
Let's look at the following examples of Korean language learners' speech and identify some of the more serious mistakes in Korean that could impact the maintenance and development of interpersonal relationships.

(1) Ciao: [Gonbu] Did you do a lot?
Woosung: No, I didn't do much.


(2) Elena: It's so hot, should we go get some ice cream?
Jeong-eun: Yes.
It's hot, so let's eat something cool.


(3) (In a situation where a teacher asks a student for a favor)
Teacher: Could you help me out for a bit after class today?
Hans: No.
I'm busy today.

(4) (In a situation where a student makes a suggestion to a teacher)
Peter: Teacher, let's have lunch.
Teacher: Oh, okay.


What seems to be the most serious mistake? In (1), Chao did not pronounce 'study' correctly but pronounced it as [gonbu], and in (2), Elena made a grammatical error by saying 'because it is hot' instead of 'because it is hot'.
(3) and (4) do not contain any specific phonetic, lexical, or grammatical errors.
However, in (3) and (4), a pragmatic failure occurred in which a foreign student used inappropriate expressions toward the teacher.
In (3), the student damaged the other person's face by using the socio-culturally inappropriate, assertive, and decisive expression "No," and in (4), the student damaged the other person's face by using the overly direct expression "-(으)ㅂし다" while suggesting a meal to a teacher of high social status and with a different age.
However, when actual Koreans encounter such pragmatic failures of learners, they may misunderstand them as a problem with the learner's personality or attitude rather than viewing them as a result of the learner's lack of Korean language knowledge (Lee Hae-young, 2009:226).
Neither the speaker nor the listener wants to damage their own face, nor do they want to damage the face of others.
In this way, conversations flow in a direction of maintaining face between each other, and to this end, speakers use various linguistic devices to show politeness in order to achieve the purpose of the conversation.
Lee Hae-young (1996:18) called the pragmatic function performed for the purpose of maintaining and promoting smooth interpersonal relationships between speakers and listeners burden reduction.
Politeness is so named because it focuses on the loss of face for the other person, but also on the speaker's face, which would be damaged if the statement were not true, rather than the other person's face.
However, this book focuses on the strategy of overcoming the threat to the other person's face, and discusses politeness in order to use universal terminology.
Brown & Levinson (1987:49) stated that politeness is a linguistic device of social relationships. Participants in a conversation display politeness to save face among themselves, and this is expressed as a linguistic device.
Linguistic devices at this time appear as phonological elements, vocabulary, and grammatical items that can be confirmed on the surface among the discourse segments that make up the discourse.
It also encompasses expressions used with pragmatic intent.
In uncovering what linguistic devices are used to express politeness, we focus on pragmatic intent that goes beyond the level of grammar or vocabulary.
Here, we need a shift in perspective, focusing on the functions that Korean grammar and lexical expressions, which have traditionally been dealt with from a morphological, syntactic, and semantic perspective, can play from a pragmatics perspective.

Korean language learners worry about using appropriate expressions when conversing with Koreans and want to know which linguistic devices are appropriate to use (Lee Hae-young, 2016:92).
However, if these linguistic devices are not properly learned, it is not easy to properly pronounce or understand them, because simply being exposed to the target language is not enough.
Bouton (1994:167) argues that educational intervention is important for learners to understand implicature.
Even after 17 months, non-native speakers still had difficulty understanding implicature types such as unmentioned criticism, chaining, POPE implicature, and relevance maxim.
Moreover, it was found that three of the four types of implicature were acquired only after four and a half years had passed (Lee Hae-young, 2015:250).
Ultimately, Korean language learners need to explicitly learn various linguistic devices to realize politeness.

These linguistic devices that learners need to learn explicitly are comprised of various levels within traditional grammar, ranging from phonological phenomena to morphemes, syntactic structures, discourse and pragmatic phenomena, and even the secondary linguistic features of spoken language that contribute to the transmission of emotions.
These seemingly diverse and heterogeneous expressions serve the same function in that they represent the speaker's attitude of politeness.
Examples of linguistic devices that express politeness in Korean include the endings of grammatical morphemes at the morphological level, and auxiliary verbs such as '주다', '보다', and '싶다', and discourse markers such as '거울', '좀', and '거기' at the lexical level.
At the syntactic level, passive sentences, indirect questions, and indirect quotations serve as devices to express politeness.
Meanwhile, at the discourse/pragmatic level, politeness can be expressed through omissions, indirect speech acts, implicatures, and rhetorical expressions.
This is presented in Chapter 3.
Based on the above argument, this paper examines the linguistic devices that express politeness as a learning item based on a doctoral dissertation published in 1996, focusing on the linguistic devices realized at the lexical and grammatical levels.
In other words, this paper will examine these linguistic devices from a perspective other than grammatical analysis, focusing on the fixed implicit meanings of grammatical forms and their pragmatic function of realizing politeness.

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