Politeness and Gender: Male and Female Polite Expressions in Students' Emails

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study is to take a corpus-pragmatic look at the politeness strategy markers utilized in Korean Students' Email Corpus(SEC). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers and students in Korea have been communicating via email without in-person meetings for the past few years. In this virtual communication, the young generation politeness is often invisible, but it is a significant component of interactions between teachers and students in Korea. This paper examines what types of polite expressions are used in actual Korean emails written by native Korean students. The study finds that both students tend to use Jeongmal to emphasize their email courtesy. Korean male students want to save their positive face with the polite expression Annyeonghasimnikka with the ending -(su)pnikka in the beginning of the emails. Korean female students, however, tend to use Dareumi anira to reduce the positive and negative face threatening acts in their email communications with a professor.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Literature Review
• 2.1. Corpus-Pragmatics
• 2.2. Politeness Theories and Face
• 3. Methodology
• 3.1. Data Collection
• 3.2. Statistics of SEC
• 3.3. Initial and Present Study of SEC
• 4. Results
• 4.1. Polite Expressions
• 4.2. Male Politeness Marker
• 4.3. Female Politeness Marker
• 5. Conclusion
• References
• Appendix