There have been many contrastive analyses of speech acts in Korean and English, however only a handful of these have been about Australian English. Especially in Australia, interactions between Australians and Koreans are increasing very rapidly, with...
There have been many contrastive analyses of speech acts in Korean and English, however only a handful of these have been about Australian English. Especially in Australia, interactions between Australians and Koreans are increasing very rapidly, with many Koreans migrating to or travelling to Australia for study or on working holiday visas. The current study aims to provide useful information to improve intercultural communication between Australians and Koreans, focusing on the performance of apologies and apology acceptances, while at the same time demonstrating some new research methods to serve as a model for improvement of research in the field of intercultural pragmatics.
Almost all studies comparing Korean and English speech acts have relied heavily on Anglocentric, English-based theories and analytical frameworks, making little or no attempt to rectify such bias in their methodology. The current study attempts to analyse Korean and Australian English apologetic speech acts and apology acceptance speech acts using definitions and typologies modified to be more objective and less Anglocentric.
Also lacking in the field of research are thorough investigations into the cultures of the languages being analysed in order to fully understand the fundamental processes at work influencing the language behaviour of the speakers of each language. The lack of such cultural knowledge has led to various misguided interpretations of data based on stereotypes or knowledge of pragmatic behaviour alone. The current study aims to provide valuable information on the cultural differences relating to values and perceptions of different types of language behaviour, to help people understand not only the differences in form or function but the different motivations that speakers have for choosing certain strategies and avoiding others, and to enable speakers to predict how hearers will interpret the forms that they use.
It is hoped that this study will lead to improvements in the field of cross-cultural pragmatic research by encouraging researchers to pay more attention to the cultural differences that motivate pragmatic differences. This is considered to be the most important kind of information for improving the effectiveness and accuracy of intercultural communication and fostering positive international relationships.
In order to gain a greater understanding of the differences between Korean and Australian culture, a range of academic sources were consulted and a variety of cultural aspects were examined in each culture. These were Hofstede(1997)’s study of dimensions of culture, from which five dimensions were examined; Choi and Kim(최상진 & 김기범, 1999)’s description of the differences between the Korean and Western concepts of self; differences in the Korean and Anglo concepts of sincerity (which are related to the differing concepts of self); and Hall(1997)’s theory of high-context and low-context cultures; totalling eight dimensions on which cultural differences were revealed.
The type of data source used in this study also differs from the majority of past studies in the area, which used discourse completion tests, following the tradition of Brown and Levinson(1987)’s politeness theory and the methodology of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) project. Dialogue was recorded by a thorough transcription process from Korean and Australian television dramas. This dialogue is considered a form of real language use, as opposed to the purposefully constructed and restricted dialogue of discourse completion tests, despite the fact that it is an imitation of natural spoken dialogue, and it has similarities to role-play methods and the passive observation of real-life dialogue.
Apology and apology acceptance sequences were isolated and classified according to typologies that were based on pragmatic function, relying less on semantic formulae. The apology strategy typology consists of some strategies that were included in the CCSARP apology typology, others that were added to account for expressions found in the data, and other categories that were modified because they were originally too Anglocentric. Those modified categories were constructed with elements from Wierzbicka(2003b)’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, which aims to give objective descriptions of concepts related to language and culture. Other strategies were also excluded because they could not be considered as realisations of apologies according to the definition adopted in this study.
A modified version of Searle(1969)’s framework for classifying speech acts was used to serve as a broad definition of the apologetic speech act, applicable to languages other than English, also to avoid Anglocentric bias.
Categories in the apology acceptance typology were based on the functions that the expressions perform in relation to the preceding apologetic speech act, and this speech act was similarly defined with a broad description relating it to the preceding apology.
Each apology sequence was coded according to the strategy types, and then also according to the social variable of the Speaker's 'relative power' in relation to the Hearer and the situational variable of the 'absolute ranking' of the offence in the culture - both of which were adapted from Brown and Levinson(1987)'s framework of variables that affect the Speaker's choice of strategies in the realisation of a speech act. Each of the variables was graded on three levels: high, medium and low. Apology acceptance sequences were not coded according to these variables because it was determined that the number of realisations of this speech act was insufficient to produce meaningful results.
To compensate for the fact that there was an unequal number of sequences and realisations in each language, each value was calculated as a percentage of all the instances in the particular language in th
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