EXPRESSING DISPLEASURE IN KOREAN: ON MITIGATION AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL FACTOR

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

As a sequence on an offensive situation, this study analyzes the act of expressing displeasure while the author’s previous research was apologizing. It examines how the universal theory of politeness accounts for Korean and what implications are involved with theories. According to this study, displeasure is expressed through several forms such as mentioning the offense, stating obligation, or giving a directive. The choice of linguistic strategies shows similarity with other languages while a cross-cultural difference is found in the way of mitigating a face-threatening act. A common strategy of indirectly stating offense or obligation is the use of interrogative sentence in Korean. Being indirect is claimed as a universal feature for threatening acts in politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987; Goffman 1971). However, universal claims from a theoretical perspective may not apply cross-culturally. A theory needs to be complemented by socio-cultural interpretation. For methodology, the data was collected from sequential research on verbal behavior occurring in offensive situations. To understand politeness in Korean, it takes into consideration linguistic behavior in the discourse level beyond the sentence level. The discourse-level analysis comes from observation-based speech. Controlled data collected through written questionnaires or role-plays tend to be limited to a single turn. Naturally-occurring data make it possible to look at contextual factors and social relationships between two parties.

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