Metapragmatic Approach to Impoliteness in Korean and English

This study aimed to investigate how impoliteness is conceptualized in Korean and American female students to reveal the discursive nature of impoliteness by comparing judgements of impoliteness based on metapragmatic data analysis. The data consisted of responses to a questionnaire filled by one hundred female students (fifty from each group). The results show that there are similarities as well as differences. Both groups of participants provided a wide range of impoliteness related concepts, revealing the variability of semantic domains that lay people associate with impoliteness. Among the various concepts, ‘rudeness’ and ‘verbal agression’ are mainly judged as impoliteness by both groups of participants. A significant difference between the two groups was that the American participants associated impoliteness with public contexts involving strangers while the Korean participants related impoliteness to both public and private settings involving friends and acquaintances. Findings from the contrastive study appear to be in line with the relational approach to impoliteness which views impoliteness as relational and proposes a discursive understanding of social norms of inappropriateness that underlie the judgements.