Personal pronouns in English and Korean texts: A corpus-based study in terms of textual interaction

Abstract

This article presents a corpus based cross-cultural text analysis of the use of 2nd person and 1st person plural pronouns in English and Korean newspaper science popularizations. Approaching texts from the perspective of ‘Reader-Involvement Evoking acts’ – that is, the writer's textual attempt to evoke the reader's involvement in textual interaction – the research compares how the writers of the two cultures manipulate the two pronouns. The analysis reveals that there are quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of the two pronouns. I argue that these are due partly to syntactic dissimilarities between the two languages such as agent omission in Korean. In addition, the results seem to be affected by the socio-cultural context such as, on the one hand the preference for indirectness in text as a means of building a harmonious relation with the reader and the collectivistic tendency in the Korean society, and on the other the writer's attitude towards the reader and scientific phenomena in the British culture. Furthermore, the different degrees of contribution of science to the economy of each country seem in particular to be reflected in the different emphases on the referential scopes of the 1st person plurals in the two corpora.