Exploring Korean Politeness Across Online and Offline Interactions

This open-access edited volume brings together the latest research on Korean politeness (K-Politeness) from multidisciplinary and multimodal perspectives across a broad range of different interactional contexts and communication platforms, both online and offline. The volume examines how Korean language speakers construct, negotiate, and utilize politeness or impoliteness as discursive practices during daily interaction. The studies not only include intimate interactions between family members and friends, but also institutional interactions between business vendors and customers, doctors and patients, talk show hosts and their guests, as well as politicians. The studies include discussions on the perception of Korean (im)politeness of K-wave viewers and fans. The role of media is discussed and how it influences public discourse and speakers’ perception and practice of Korean (im)politeness. This text also examines interactions through instant text messages, chat boxes in livestreaming sites, online chat boxes with business vendors, and related communication channels.

Although the disciplines and methodologies may vary, the studies are based on empirical research. This volume provides new insights through contributions from researchers of different disciplines, including communications, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and pragmatics; it appeals to students and researchers in these fields.

Introduction: K-Politeness Across Online and Offline Interactions.- What Do Korean Speakers Know About Politeness?.- Korean Honorific Speech Level Markers as Contextualization Cues in Family Instant Messages.- Addressee Honorifics as an Interactional Resource for Socialization in Korean Adult-Child Interaction.- Solidarity through Negotiated Interactional Identities in Korean.

Mary Shin Kim is Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research focuses on conversation analysis, discourse pragmatics, and language teaching and learning. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Discourse Processes, Discourse Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and Text and Talk. She is one of the authors of a series of best-selling Korean language workbooks (Integrated Korean series). She is a recipient of the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature Junior/Mid-Career Faculty Excellence in Scholarship & Research Award and the Academy of Korean Studies research grant.