Cultural Differences in Politeness and Notion of Flattery
DOI :10.21049/ccs.2013.33..331
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
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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:• There is a notional gap of positive politeness • Superiors enjoy an unfair advantage in the power and solidarity system • 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 • The notion and practice of flattery heavily favors superiors • 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.
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