서강대학교

초록/요약 도움말

The objective of this thesis is to investigate the addressee's perception towards the degree of offensiveness and his/her response to impolite speech acts. As an experimental pragmatic analysis, this study focuses on impolite speech acts such as complaining, disagreeing and disregarding which are frequently encountered in everyday conversation. Previous researchers have interpreted impolite speech acts differently. Brown and Levinson (1987) who first systemized politeness as a linguistic theory emphasize impoliteness based on cultural universality, whereas Blum-Kulka (1987) who dealt with empirical studies argues that cultural relativity should be taken into consideration. I assume that the present study is in line with Blum-Kulka's perspective and try to examine how native speakers of Korean perceive the degree of linguistic impoliteness depending on the different strategies of speech acts and contexts. Each scenario consists of three different strategies and three different contents. Three strategies are bald on record (directness), off record (non-conventional indirectness) and non-verbal strategy. In addition, power a/symmetry is designed to be an independent variable for each scenario. Method for this study uses a survey containing multiple choice by Likert-like five point scales and Discourse Completion Task (DCT). This study used three contents such as complaining, disagreeing and disregarding. The results showed that relative power had a strong influence on the addressee's perception of offensiveness according to the different strategies of impolite speech acts. In particular, the addressee with relatively higher power than the speaker felt more offended when the speaker employed off record or non-verbal impolite speech acts than those with bald on record. In addition, I analyzed the results of DCT on the basis of Culpeper et al.'s (2003) notion of counter-attack and Culpeper's (1996) theory of linguistic impoliteness. The findings showed that most of the strategies the participants employed as counter-offensive response were relevant to bald on record impoliteness and positive impoliteness. These results present that using bald on record impoliteness (e.g. conveying impolite utterances directly) and positive impoliteness (e.g. using impolite utterances such as taboo words) is regarded as impolite linguistic strategies that threat others' face and offend their emotion.