• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-80
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• 2011

The study examines how Koreans' politeness is realized in a speech act, request. The main focus is to explore underlying rationale and influence involved in their performance, not just the comparison of difference in politeness realization between native and nonnative speakers of English, as previous studies did. The study employs the DCT, an attached politeness scale questionnaire, and interviews. Twenty nine university students participated in the study. Interchangeable reading of the three data yields some interesting and valuable insights. The participants heavily rely on a few formulaic expressions to express politeness, such as interrogatives with modal verbs, please and excuse me as a politeness marker. They want to use honorific address terms that is literally translated into English, and have a belief that there are honorific words in English as in Korean. The study refers to the participants' voice on indirectness, nonverbal messages, and expressions with different connotations between English and Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.55-62
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• 2011

This paper investigates whether listeners perceive a different level of politeness when the duration of the Korean sentence-final auxiliary particle '-yo' is varied. A total of 10 Korean sentences were manipulated by lengthening and shortening '-yo' by 10%, 20%, and 30%. The participants included native Korean speakers and Chinese and Japanese learners of Korean (n=10, respectively). They were asked to rate the level of politeness of the stimuli on a 9-point scale. It was found that Korean listeners perceived decreased politeness as the duration of '-yo' was shortened and increased politeness as it was lengthened. However, Chinese and Japanese listeners did not perceive a different level of politeness from the manipulated sentences. This finding suggests that it is important to teach L2 speakers that the duration of the auxiliary particle '-yo' plays a role in Korean listeners' perception of politeness.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.93-119
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• 2009

Internalized Confucian cultural scripts trigger meta-pragmatic thinking in Korean communication. Commonly shared cultural knowledge acts as a powerful constraint upon the behavioral patterns of each participant and this knowledge can be strategically manipulated to avoid confrontations. The strategic use of address reference terms utilizes cultural values as a face-redress mechanism to achieve situation-specific goals. This paper offers a view of Korean address reference terms that rests on four revisions of politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987). First, the notion of discernment - or 'wakimae' - as a culture-specific mechanism is reanalyzed. Secondly, culture-specific values as another R (ranking of imposition) variable are introduced. Thirdly, a reevaluation of the notion of positive face (respect) is discussed. Finally, the address reference terms in combination with other honorifics by the speaker that can be strategically applied either to threaten or to enhance the face of the hearer is observed. Because Confucianism is embedded in Korean cultural identity, teaching cultural values integrated and their roles in situation-dependent politeness is required in order to understand interactional nature of politeness occurring from particular discourse contexts.

• MALSORI
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• no.45
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• pp.15-22
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• 2003

This study is a kind of a preliminary study to develop naturalness of dialog TTS system. In this study, as major characteristics of politeness in Korean, temporal(total duration of utterances, speech rate and duration of utterance final syllables) and F0(mean F0, boundary tone pattern, F0 range) features were discussed through acoustic analysis of recorded data of semantically neutral sentences, which were spoken by ten professional voice actors under two conditions of utterance type - namely, normal and polite type. The results show that temporal characteristics were significantly different according to the utterance type but F0 characteristics were not.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.33
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• pp.331-358
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• 2013

This paper looks into several aspects of linguistic behaviors attested in Korean and American English corpora. A special attention is paid to the areas of politeness phenomena, terms of address, power and solidarity, practice of flattery, and closely-related non-linguistic behaviors such as tipping and gift-giving conventions. An analysis of the data reveals that Korean society remains very much superior-oriented, non-egalitarian, non-democratic despite the pride and sense of accomplishment among the populace that the nation has achieved a satisfactory level of democracy. In particular, the following facts in Korean and the Korean society are exposed by an examination of the data: ${\bullet}$ There is a notional gap of positive politeness ${\bullet}$ Superiors enjoy an unfair advantage in the power and solidarity system ${\bullet}$ The terms of address system is set up to make a clear distinction between levels and the terms of address, in turn, dictate norms of expected behavior ${\bullet}$ The notion and practice of flattery heavily favors superiors ${\bullet}$ Non-linguistic acts of gift-giving and tipping are consistent with the examined social interactions As a result, all the benefits, emotional as well as material, are garnered by superiors. These facts may reflect the real Korea that people are used to being comfortable with, a pre-modern, feudalistic society, something akin to its kin in the north. We may proclaim that we aspire to a more democratic society. However, it appears Koreans, deep inside, may have been seeking a powerful dictator all along. These findings help provide a partial but insightful clue to the political puzzle: why Koreans grew uncomfortable with an egalitarian and democratic president and could not save him, but instead replaced him with a succession of a corrupted businessman and the authoritarian daughter of a former dictator. The flight to democracy has stalled in midair, not quite making the grade yet. There is plenty of linguistic evidence in Korean.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.51-66
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• 2001

This paper compares different uses of downgraders by Korean English speakers (KES) with those by American English native speakers (AENS) in their requestive e-mail. Three different situations in which social power and distance were controlled were set up to examine and compare the participants' politeness strategies in requestive e-mail. It was found that the KESs' use of downgraders appeared differently from the AENSs' use qualitatively and quantitatively across three situations. The AENSs used downgraders almost three times as more, resulting in a much more mitigated and polite effect in requests. The AENSs' requests were mostly modified by syntactic modifiers, such as aspect, tense, conditional, and consultative devices. On the other hand, the KESs' requests were modified mostly by politeness markers and conditionals in a limited number of requests.

• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.127-150
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• 2010

This study aims to analyze the gap between university students' cognitions and expectations on users' cognitions about dimensions of library staff service quality and the reason of gap. The results showed that the overal service didn't reach the users' minimum expectation. Among the every item of service quality, the greatest expectation service was the quick delivery of non home library materials and staff's politeness. The most great was in-depth subject services and friendly encounter. The staff service quality gave the library satisfaction; in-depth subject services, exact understanding of user needs and politeness. The great gaps were caused to the lack of willingness to answer question, the lack of communication, and the lack of user care etc.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.61 no.3
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• pp.51-62
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to examine the visual evaluation of image according to the style, hue, value, and chroma of the male clothing and the preference of image. A quasi-experimental method was used for this study. The first factorial design was the $2{\times}3{\times}2{\times}2$ (style of upper clothes ${\times}$ hue ${\times}$ chroma ${\times}$ color of trousers), and the second factorial design was the $2{\times}3{\times}2$ (style of upper clothes ${\times}$ value ${\times}$ color of trousers). The styles of upper clothes were a soutien collar casual jacket and a polo shirt. The subjects were 509 female college students living in Seoul. Factor analysis showed five image categories of men's clothing: initiative, dignity, politeness, activity, and mildness. Yellow was evaluated as having the highest initiative and activity. Blue was shown to have lower mildness than red and yellow. The high saturated chroma was perceived to be higher initiative and activity than low chroma. The shirts were evaluated higher in activity and mildness than the casual jackets were. The beige pants were perceived to be higher in dignity and mildness than the dark blue pants. The high chroma jackets were perceived to be higher in both initiative and activity than the low chroma jackets. The navy blue pants with the upper clothes in low chroma blue were perceived to be higher in politeness than with the upper clothes in low chroma red or yellow. The low value clothes were perceived to be higher in both initiative and dignity.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.141-160
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• 2007

User interface has been regarded as a crucial issue to increase the acceptance of mobile services. In special, even though to what extent the machine as speaker communicates with human as listener in a timely and polite manner is important, fundamental studies to come up with these issues have been very rare. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology of estimating politeness level in a certain context-aware setting and then to design a context-aware system for polite mobile interface. We will focus on Korean language for the polite level estimation simply because the polite interface would highly depend on cultural and linguistic characteristics. Nested Minkowski aggregation model, which amends Minkowski aggregation model, is adopted as a privacy-preserving similarity evaluation for case retrieval under distributed computing environment such as ubiquitous computing environment. To show the feasibility of the methodology proposed in this paper, simulation-based experiment with drama cases has performed to show the performance of the methodology proposed in this paper.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.15-20
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• 2021

In line with recent attention to the multimodal expression of politeness, the present study examined the association between polite speech and acoustic features through the analysis of vowels produced in casual and polite speech contexts in Korean. Fourteen adult native speakers of Seoul Korean produced the utterances in two social conditions to elicit polite (professor) and casual (friend) speech. Vowel duration and the first (F1) and second formants (F2) of seven sentence- and phrase-initial monophthongs were measured. The results showed that polite speech shares acoustic similarities with vowel production in clear speech: speakers showed greater vowel space expansion in polite than casual speech in an effort to enhance perceptual intelligibility. Especially, female speakers hyperarticulated (front) vowels for polite speech, independent of speech rate. The implications for the acoustic encoding of social stance in polite speech are further discussed.