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"You should marry me now. This is a director’s order": politeness and discourse strategies by Korean women in non-traditional authority positions

University of British Columbia

The subject of language and gender has been a central problem for linguists and social scientists for much of the last century. Yet in all this time the study of Korean language and gender has been largely undeveloped. This study contributes to that neglected area of Korean language and gender by examining how working women in positions of power employ politeness in their request speech acts, and what type of discourse strategies they utilize to enact their authority in non-traditional domains. This study compares the use of various speech levels and honorifics by both male and female executives as observed in several Korean television dramas. Results show that female superiors use fewer polite directives than male superiors, thereby confuting the traditional claim that women's speech is more polite than men's. The second major finding is that female superiors modify and defeminize their speech in order to enact their authority. On the whole, female superiors embodied the status difference with their subordinates by use of less polite directives, whereas male superiors minimized an asymmetrical alignment with their subordinates by use of more polite directives. These unexpected findings are explained through a consideration of three social variables involved in the interaction; social distance between superior and the subordinate, differences in age, and differences in status. The study thus proves that the context of interaction is the key to explaining why members in one sex group utilize more polite directives than the other, and that sex of the speaker is only a partial determinant in the language choice made by women and men.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-05-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8266

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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