A Contrastive Analysis Of Politeness In English And Korean

This paper aims at a comparative study on politeness in English and Korean in cross-cultural communication. It is argued that politeness manifestations are common language components used in communication and basis of successful communication between different cultures. However, due to different cultural backgrounds, people in English and Korean cultures tend to choose different politeness formulae to show courtesy, thus giving rise to the occurrence of pragmatic failure during cross-cultural communication. Therefore, it is necessary for people to grasp the differences between English and Korean politeness in order to avoid every kind of misunderstanding and communication failure.With the development of theories on cross-cultural communication, it is far from enough to study politeness in a single culture, because politeness has different forms in different cultures. This paper attempts to explore the English and Korean politeness from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. With a great amount of relevant data, the similarities and differences between English and Korean politeness are collected and analyzed in terms of how address forms and compliments are used and how to express thanks and apologies and even how to show requests and invitations. In addition, this paper not only compares the different politeness formulae between English and Korean, but also compares the disparities in the usage of polite language. This paper reflects the cultural factors resulting in the different polite language usages and puts forward some suggestions on how to cultivate and improve one's communicative competence in the hope that the findings of this study can be applicable to complement the relevant previous study.