2014, Vol.22, No.3

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 1226-4822
https://journal.kci.go.kr/socioling

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). This study examines gender differences, focusing on the functions of English tag questions using three social variables: age, education, and private/public situations. This research is a corpus-based study which used 753 tag questions extracted from the British component of International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). This paper is the sequel to Kim Hye-Sook(2010), which examined gender differences in the frequency of tag usage. In this present study attention was turned to functions of tag questions to examine whether the gender differences in the tag usage were related to different tag functions. The four functions considered in the study were informational, facilitating, softening and challenging(cf., Holmes 1995; Tottie & Hoffmann 2006). The 753 tags were categorized into those four functions by a native speaker of British English. The tags used by the British men and women in the ICE-GB corpus had no significant gender differences in the functions of tag questions. The tags were used consistently in the order of informational, facilitating, challenging, and softening by both men and women regardless of age, education and private/public situations.

This study investigates some pragmatic effects of Korean college students’ e-mail letters about their grades sent to English speaking professors. The pragmatic effects of 51 naturally occurring e-mail messages were evaluated by 4 native professors of English from the U.S. and New Zealand. The results show that Korean students at their intermediate proficiency level in English were found to be not very successful in writing e-mails inquiring about their grades. Their inappropriate pragmatic behaviors include structural informality of the letters, illegitimate goal of the letters, rude or not specific enough requests, some irrelevant or inefficient supportive moves and casual languages and symbols. Based on the students’ pragmatic failures in their messages, some relevant pragmatic norms of the native English professors were identified first, which were then compared to some Australian students’ linguistic behaviors in the same speech event to elicit the common core of the pragmatic rules of native speakers of English. Some additional interviews with the native evaluators were also carried out to clarify their baseline norms regarding some controversial aspects of the messages and to acquire some ethnographic information about their relationship with the students as well as other off-line interactions and practices in their academic community. This study finally discusses some implications of the results from the perspectives of applied linguistics and intercultural rhetoric.

This study analyzes how a journalist can design his question to strike a balance between two competing journalistic norms-neutrality and adversarialness-within the framework of conversation analysis. An analysis of the three news interview segments in JTBC News 9 reveals that the interviewer, Seok-hee Sohn, resorts to the extensive use of prefaced questions. These prefaced questions depict the third person-attributed statements in a way that distances Sohn from his more overtly opinionated remarks. The use of quotation from others serves a dual function: it enables the interviewer to express adversarial criticism of his guests, while maintaining a formally neutralistic posture. Yet this strategy is also employed to give the interviewee the chance to justify him/herself. Particular attention should be given to the observation that Sohn deliberately refrains from asking questions after revealing sensitive details about the interviewee. The interviewer sometimes implicitly voices his own adversarial stance even in a seemingly neutralistic question, thereby showing how the interviewer can function as a ‘devil's advocate’ in a news interview. The question design examined in this study suggests that innovation in question design and rhetoric in news interviews can reflect changes in social and political attitudes, norms, and behavior.