East Asian Languages and Literatures Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing East Asian Languages and Literatures Theses and Dissertations by Author "Brown, Lucien"

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    Agency at Play: Impoliteness and Korean Language in Online Interactions
    (University of Oregon, 2019-04-30) Kim, Ariel; Brown, Lucien
    (Im)politeness research has often focused on either the importance of social norms or on the intentions of the speaker, overlooking the active role played by the recipient(s) in assigning social meaning. This limitation pertains particularly to so-called “discernment languages” such as Korean and Japanese. This work addresses this gap by focusing on recipient agency in interpretations/evaluations of impoliteness. Two sets of data are drawn from the naturally occurring computer-mediated communications that appeared in two popular internet portal sites in South Korea. Both sets of data contain metapragmatic discussions of impoliteness that involve recipient evaluation of a speaker’s actions and language use as offensive or not. I focus on how the recipients in the data agentively evaluate the language used by speakers, including inconsistent evaluations of non-honorific language, or panmal. The results show that variability in the interpretation of (im)politeness cannot be explained solely by social norms or intentions, and must also include the socially-mediated agency of the recipient(s).
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    Impoliteness, Identity and Power in Korean: Critical Discourse Analysis and Perception Study of Impoliteness
    (University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Lee, Keunyoung; Brown, Lucien
    The current dissertation aims to further our understanding of the impoliteness phenomenon in language by investigating how impoliteness is connected to the construction of identity and the exercise of power in on-going interaction. To achieve the research goal, the study closely examines naturally occurring polylogal discourse from two different institutional settings in the context of Korean: the TV talk show (television entertainment discourse) and the National Assembly’s hearing (political discourse). Following the notion of relational work proposed by Locher and Watts (2005) and the bottom-up approach (i.e. impoliteness 1 or first order impoliteness) which focuses on participants’ judgements of discourse in interaction, the study argues that impoliteness is inextricably linked to participants’ co-constructions of identity as an interactional resource causing conflicts and as a linguistic index showing where co-participants identities are negotiated. The study also argues that impoliteness plays a significant role in the exercise of power in political discourse by illustrating that the successful use of impoliteness causing offense is strategically used to restrict the action environment of one’s interlocutor. The findings of the study suggests that the judgements of impoliteness are related to the institutional norms and expectations but also highly context-dependent. The study also expands the discussion of impoliteness to L2 learners’ perception of impoliteness in the target language by examining how L2 proficiency and cross-cultural variations affect learner’s perception of impoliteness. It is observed that there is L2 proficiency effect when the context has limited visual and prosodic features that learners can rely on for their judgements. The study identifies that Korean honorifics is one of the major causes which lead the novice learners to misjudge impolite utterances as polite because they could not understand the sarcastic use of honorifics which appear as polite on surface but convey offensive and insincere messages. The results of the study suggest that interpreting humor, jokes and sarcasm/irony is a quite difficult pragmatic task for the novice L2 learners.
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    Politeness and Multimodality in Korean and Japanese
    (University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Kim, Hyun Ji; Brown, Lucien
    This dissertation work aims to explore multimodal strategies of politeness in Korean and Japanese by investigating 7 hours of spoken and visual data produced by Korean and Japanese speakers. The analysis particularly deals with ways of controlling density of lexical information, use of kinetic cues and manipulation of gestural space in deferential and non-deferential situations. To begin, the first study examines how speech in interactions with a status-superior and a status-equal differ in the quantity of honorific lexemes, honorific sentence-ending particles, formal case-marking particles, mimetics, Chinese-origin words, pronouns, fillers and backchannels. Statistical tests revealed that use of honorifics and other lexical items that are related to formality and politeness increase in deferential situations. On the other hands, the general quantity of lexical information given to the addressee did not significantly differ in deferential and non-deferential situations. Second, in the study on kinetic cues of politeness, it was found that deference and intimacy can be embedded by manipulating multiple types of nonverbal behavior involving manual gesture, head movements (nodding and shaking), erect body posture, eye contact and self-touch by looking at the frequency in formal and informal situations. In general, both native speakers of Korean and Japanese more actively and animatedly moved their bodies in intimate situations compared to deferential situations. An additional analysis further revealed that Korean and Japanese speakers use smaller gestural space to produce manual gestures when interacting with a superior than when interacting with a friend. In conclusion, this study contributes to developing methodological approaches of research on politeness by demonstrating that politeness-related verbal and nonverbal behaviors can be quantitatively examined. Furthermore, the statistical results indicating particular verbal and nonverbal patterns of (im)politeness support the perspective that politeness is a social practice of members of a community that share similar moral orders. Lastly, the findings that show how (im)politeness is complicatedly expressed in verbal and nonverbal ways can also have significant educational implications in that this research has brought to the forefront the issues in classes of Korean and Japanese where the focus of (im)politeness instruction has been placed mainly on honorifics rather than the true multimodality of (im)politeness.