모바일 메신저 대화에서 나타나는 공손 전략

Politeness Strategies in Conversations through Mobile Messaging Applications

The purpose of this study is to explore politeness strategies found in conversations through mobile messaging application (MMA). MMA, which is represented by Kakao Talk in Korea, is the most frequently used application on smartphones, and now MMA communication seems to be replacing traditional telephone or even face-to-face conversations. However, unlike telephone or face-to-face conversations, MMA communication lacks prosodic and supralinguistic features which are very important parts of communication. Therefore, people try to manage MMA conversations not to be misunderstood their intentions. The current study analyzed some group conversations and one-on-one conversations made through Kakao Talk and investigated politeness strategies. Firstly, people make use of wide range of stylistic variations, from very formal written style to non-standard casual style, to regulate the atmosphere of the conversation. Secondly, there appear lots of attempts to build rapport among conversation participants using emoticons, slangs, and many non-standard internet jargons. Also, people use lots of collaborative tokens such as back-channeling and onomatopoeic and mimetic expressions. Thirdly, there appear many adjacent pairs which are separated by many turns, which is rare in oral conversations. Thus, people try to respond their conversation partners even after a long time. Fourthly, it appears that MMA users try to avoid imposing others for responding quickly: delayed or lack of response and omission of opening or closing remarks seem to be well understood. At the same time they appear to feel obligation of responding as quickly as possible. This study concludes that MMA enables people maintain social relationship widely, respecting each other’s privacy and politeness is considered importantly but not strictly.