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The embodied enactment of politeness metapragmatics

  • Lucien Brown

    Lucien Brown is Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. He has published extensively on multimodal politeness and pragmatics, both in native speaker and language learner contexts. He is the author of Korean Honorifics and Politeness in Second Language Learning (John Benjamins, 2011) and serves as Associate Editor for Journal of Pragmatics.

     EMAIL logo     , Soung-U Kim

    Soung-U Kim is Research Fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at SOAS University of London. He works on language description and documentation, with a special focus on Jejuan, a Koreanic language of Jeju Province, South Korea. In his ethnographic work on South Korean language ideologies and linguistic marginalisation, he has been applying qualitative interviewing and grounded theory approaches.

         and Hyunji Kim

    Hyunji Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Kennesaw State University. She received her PhD in East Asian Linguistics from the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on (im)politeness and analyzes its socio-pragmatic purposes through a multimodal lens.
Published/Copyright: September 28, 2022
Journal of Politeness Research
From the journal Journal of Politeness Research Volume 19 Issue 1

Abstract

Whereas previous research on metapragmatic talk has tended to focus on what people say about politeness, the current paper additionally explores how people talk about politeness. More specifically, we extend our analysis to the embodied resources, including gestures and nonverbal behaviour, that people use when enacting politeness talk. The data comes from two semi-structured interviews that we conducted with South Korean participants, both of whom were middle-aged university professors. We subjected the data to three rounds of analysis. First, we thematically coded the content of the narratives, revealing important differences in how these two participants from the same language background conceived of politeness. Second, we analyzed the appearance of verbal and non-verbal markers of deferential politeness. This analysis revealed that the overall bodily comportment of the two participants closely matched the different politeness narratives that they inhabited. Third and finally, we examined how the participants used bodily movements when evoking specific embodied practices related to politeness, and used embodied behaviours to represent abstract politeness-related concepts and map them onto spatial locations. Overall, the analysis shows that metapragmatic talk about politeness is an embodied achievement and thus needs to be treated within the remit of the multimodal turn in politeness research.

Keywords: embodiment; gesture; Korean; metapragmatics; politeness
Corresponding author: Lucien Brown, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Menzies Building, 20 Chancellors Walk, Monash University, Clayton 3800, Australia, E-mail:

Funding source: Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100019898

Award Identifier / Grant number: AKS-2016-LAB-2250003

About the authors

Lucien Brown

Lucien Brown is Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. He has published extensively on multimodal politeness and pragmatics, both in native speaker and language learner contexts. He is the author of Korean Honorifics and Politeness in Second Language Learning (John Benjamins, 2011) and serves as Associate Editor for Journal of Pragmatics.

Soung-U Kim

Soung-U Kim is Research Fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at SOAS University of London. He works on language description and documentation, with a special focus on Jejuan, a Koreanic language of Jeju Province, South Korea. In his ethnographic work on South Korean language ideologies and linguistic marginalisation, he has been applying qualitative interviewing and grounded theory approaches.

Hyunji Kim

Hyunji Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Kennesaw State University. She received her PhD in East Asian Linguistics from the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on (im)politeness and analyzes its socio-pragmatic purposes through a multimodal lens.

Acknowledgments

We are eternally grateful to Grace Eunhae Oh at Konkuk University for her enormous help to make the data collection possible, and to Bodo Winter for his input during the early stages of the project. We also thank Heeju Song, Yiseul Won, Kumseon Choi and Lucy Park who worked as RAs on the project at different stages. We gratefully acknowledge the generous feedback of two anonymous reviewers, through which we were able to improve our manuscript substantially.

  1. Research funding: This research was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (https://doi.org/10.13039/501100019898) under the grant AKS-2016-LAB-2250003.

Appendix: Interview questions (English translations)

The interviews were semi-structured and the following was used just as a guide.

Part #1: General Questions

  1. What is the most important thing for you when interacting with other people?

  2. What do you have to be careful to do when interacting with older people?

  3. What do you have to be careful to do when interacting with close friends?

  4. How does the way you use language change according to the context?

  5. How does the sound of your voice change according to the context?

  6. How does the way you use nonverbal behavior change according to the context?

  7. What does _________ (term used by participant) mean?

  8. Can you give me an example of _________ (term used by participant)?

Part #2: Questions about Concepts

We asked questions about the following Korean politeness-related terms: yeyuy paluta ‘polite’, yeyuy epsta ‘impolite’, concwunghata ‘respect’, mwusihata ‘disrespect’, chincelhata ‘courteous’ and pwulchincelhata ‘discourteous’.

  1. What does _________ (politeness-related term) mean?

  2. When do you have to pay attention to _________?

  3. How do you talk when you are performing _________?

  4. What nonverbal behavior do you associate with speaking in contaysmal and panmal?

  5. Does your facial expression, posture or gestures change in contaysmal and panmal?

  6. Is yeyuy palum ‘politeness’ and contaysmal a positive thing? Can too much of it be negative or burdensome?

Part #3: Cross-perceptions of different groups

  1. How does politeness differ between men and women?

  2. How does politeness differ between older and younger generations?

  3. Do you think speaking Seoul is more polite than speaking a regional dialect?

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Received: 2021-08-17
Accepted: 2022-04-12
Published Online: 2022-09-28
Published in Print: 2023-02-23

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Multimodal mitigation: how facial and body cues index politeness in Catalan requests
  4. “I look with deep gratitude and admiration…” – praising and complimenting in papal speeches
  5. Experiments into the influence of linguistic (in)directness on perceived face-threat in Twitter complaints
  6. The impact of linguistic choices and (para-)linguistic markers on the perception of Twitter complaints by other customers: an experimental approach
  7. (Im)politeness as a tool to categorize interactive discourse markers of Arabic in radio shows
  8. The embodied enactment of politeness metapragmatics
  9. Politeness of nonverbal hospitality in Saudi and British female interactions
  10. Borrowing of address forms for dimensions of social relation in a contact-induced multilingual community
  11. (Im)politeness on Facebook during the Covid-19 pandemic
  12. Book Reviews
  13. Mugford, Gerrard. 2019. Addressing Difficult Situations in Foreign-Language Learning. Confusion, Impoliteness, and Hostility
  14. From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: multilingual and multicultural perspectives
https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2021-0033
Keywords for this article
embodiment; gesture; Korean; metapragmatics; politeness

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Multimodal mitigation: how facial and body cues index politeness in Catalan requests
  4. “I look with deep gratitude and admiration…” – praising and complimenting in papal speeches
  5. Experiments into the influence of linguistic (in)directness on perceived face-threat in Twitter complaints
  6. The impact of linguistic choices and (para-)linguistic markers on the perception of Twitter complaints by other customers: an experimental approach
  7. (Im)politeness as a tool to categorize interactive discourse markers of Arabic in radio shows
  8. The embodied enactment of politeness metapragmatics
  9. Politeness of nonverbal hospitality in Saudi and British female interactions
  10. Borrowing of address forms for dimensions of social relation in a contact-induced multilingual community
  11. (Im)politeness on Facebook during the Covid-19 pandemic
  12. Book Reviews
  13. Mugford, Gerrard. 2019. Addressing Difficult Situations in Foreign-Language Learning. Confusion, Impoliteness, and Hostility
  14. From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: multilingual and multicultural perspectives
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