Abstract
This paper shows how Korean speakers use different strategies to increase solidarity among newly acquainted interlocutors in performing common tasks by co-constructing through the negotiation process of their interactional identities and adjusting themselves to the right level of intimacy and/or politeness within the given interaction. According to (Swann, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53:1038–1051, 1987), 2008), “identity negotiation” refers to the processes where interactants try to find a balance between their interactional and identity-related goals, keeping a conflict-free relation between their interpersonal and intrapersonal interactions. The ways in which Korean speakers negotiate their situational and interactional identity will be illustrated using excerpts taken from TV talk shows, reality shows, or dramas where different participants achieve what is considered an adequate level of intimacy with their conversational partners within the given tasks as the show participants. In interactions where Korean speakers meet for the first time, it is very common to see how they exchange personal information. Among them, interlocutors’ age is very often exchanged at the very early stage of their encounter. In many reality shows and talk shows on Korean TV, participants often start their first-time encounter by asking about their age and work-related backgrounds. Interlocutors achieve an increased level of intimacy by assigning new interactional identities to themselves, that of (a) friends (=same age), (b) siblings (=different age), or (c) senior/junior (work-related). Oftentimes, this process is streamlined by adjusting their speech style and/or address terms that match their newly constructed identities in order to successfully perform their common tasks.
Chapter PDF
Keywords
References
Alptekin, C. (2002). Towards intercultural communicative competence in ELT. ELT Journal, 56(1), 57–64.
Brown, L. (2010a). Questions of appropriateness and authenticity in the representation of Korean honorifics in textbooks for second language learners. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 23(1), 35–50.
Brown, L. (2010b). Politeness and second language learning: The case of Korean speech styles. Journal of Politeness Research, 6(2), 243–270.
Brown, L. (2011). Korean honorifics and politeness in second language learning. John Benjamins.
Brown, L. (2013). Teaching “casual” and/or “impolite” language through multimedia: The case of non-honorific panmal speech styles in Korean. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 26(1), 1–18.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press
Byon, A. (2003). Language socialization and Korean as a heritage language: A study of Hawaiian classrooms. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 16(3), 269–283.
Byon, A. (2007). Teaching the polite and the deferential speech levels using media materials: Advanced KFL classroom settings. In D. Yoshimi & H. Wang (Eds.), Selected papers from Pragmatics in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Classroom: The State of the Art (pp. 21–64). NFLRC, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Multilingual Matters.
Byram, M. (2009). The intercultural speaker and pedagogy of foreign language education. D. K. Deardorff (Ed.), The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Competence. Sage.
Chen, G. M., & Starosta, W. J. (1999). A review of the concept of intercultural awareness. Human Communication, 2, 27–54.
Choo, M. (2006). The structure and use of Korean honorifics. In H. Sohn (Ed.), Korean language in culture and society (pp. 132–154). University of Hawai’i Press.
Choo, M. (1999). Teaching language styles of Korean. In S. Kang (Ed.), The Korean language in America (pp. 77–95). American Association of Teachers of Korean.
Eun, J., & Strauss, S. (2004). The primacy of information status in the alternation between Korean deferential and polite forms in public discourse. Language Sciences, 26, 251–272.
Han, K. (2004). Hyentay wulimaluy machimssikkuth yenkwu. (A study on modern Korean sentence endings). Yeklak.
Jo, H. (2001). Heritage language learning and ethnic identity: Korean Americans’ struggle with language authorities. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 14(1), 26–41.
Kiaer, J., Park, M.-J., Choi, N., & Drigg, D. (2019). The roles of age, gender and setting in Korean half-talk shift. Discourse and Cognition, 26(3), 279–308.
Kim, K.-H., & Suh, K. H. (2007). Style shift in Korean pedagogical discourse. Sahoyenehak (the Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea), 15(2), 1–29.
Kim-Renaud, Y.-K. (2001). Change in Korean honorifics reflecting social change. In T. McAuley (Ed.), Language change in East Asia (pp. 27–46). Curzon Press.
Lee, C. (2000). A frame-based analysis of Korean talk shows. Enewa Enehak. (Language and Linguistics), 25, 177–197.
Park, M. Y. (2014). A study of the Korean sentence-ender-(u)psita: Implementing activity transitions in the KFL classroom. Journal of Pragmatics, 68, 25–39.
Rhee, S. (2008). On the rise and fall of Korean nominalizers. In M. J. Lopez-Como & E. Seoane (Eds.), Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives (pp. 239–264), (Typological Studies in Language 76) John Benjamins.
Sohn, H.-M. (1999). The Korean language. Cambridge University Press.
Sohn, H-M. (2007). Politeness as a cause of linguistic change in Korean. In H-M. Sohn (Ed.), Topics in Korean language and linguistics (pp. 576–592). Korean University Press.
Sohn, H.-M. (1981). Power and solidarity in the Korean language. Paper in Linguistics, 14(3), 431–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351818109370546
Sohn, S. O. (1995). The design of curriculum for teaching Korean as a heritage language. The Korean Language in America, 1, 19–35.
Song, J. J. (2005). The Korean language: Structure, use, and context. Routledge.
Strauss, S., & Eun, J. (2005). Indexicality and honorific speech level choice in Korean. Linguistics, 43(3), 611–651.
Swann, W. B., Jr. (1987). Identity negotiation: Where two roads meet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1038–1051.
Swann, W. B., Jr., & Bosson, J. K. (2008). Identity negotiation: A theory of self and social interaction. In O. John, R. Robins, & L. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology: Theory and research (pp. 448–471). Guilford.
Tannen, D. (1993). The relativity of linguistic strategies: Rethinking power and solidarity in gender and dominance. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Gender and conversational interaction (pp. 165–188). Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Park, MJ. (2024). Solidarity Through Negotiated Interactional Identities in Korean. In: Kim, M.S. (eds) Exploring Korean Politeness Across Online and Offline Interactions. Advances in (Im)politeness Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50698-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50698-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-50697-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-50698-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)