The Conventional Implicature of the Korean Auxiliary Particle ‘bakke’ and Its Educational Implications for Distinguishing Similar Grammatical Items

This study analyzes the conventional implicature of the Korean auxiliary particle ‘bakke’ and examines its potential as a criterion for distinguishing similar grammatical items. The findings suggest that ‘bakke’ conveys an expectation-violation implicature beyond its basic meanings of limitation or exclusion, and that this reading may extend to mark a gap between informational expectation and factual reality. Furthermore, this study investigates phrasal expressions containing ‘bakke’, showing that in some cases the implicature is preserved, while in others it is weakened and conventionalized at the phrasal level. Based on these findings, this study explores educational implications for Korean language education by presenting a restructured teacher’s guide that highlights the pragmatic contrast between ‘bakke’ and ‘man’. This study contributes to broadening the criteria for semantic distinction and to exploring the potential of a pragmatics-based perspective in language pedagogy.