Obligation and reader involvement in English and Korean science popularizations: a corpus-based cross-cultural text analysis

Abstract

Most research English/Korean cross-cultural text analysis has focused comparing discourse organization of academic texts written by English native speakers and ESL learners. However, this provides a limited view of textual differences between two cultures. In present research, we analyze a genre with a mass readership-newspaper science popularization texts-from an interpersonal perspective. Using two corpora of 356 British and Korean newspaper articles, we investigated modal expressions of obligation. Analytical categories were devised based two aspects: who is imposing obligation? (the obligation-imposer) and on whom obligation is imposed? (the obligation-imposed). The analysis shows differences in ways in which obligation is imposed reader in two corpora. The English writers depend more third-person scientific experts as the obligation-imposer, and tend to specify the explicitly. In contrast, Korean writers are more likely to impose obligation in their own persona, and to represent obligation-imposed implicitly. We explore in what ways these differences can be seen as reflecting cultural norms, focusing especially individualism and task-orientedness that are held to be characteristic of Western cultures as opposed to collectivism and relation-orientedness of Korean culture.