What Korean apologies require of politeness theory

Abstract

This paper examines a corpus of Korean apologies to discover why a person apologizes and why they choose the form of apology that they do. It argues for an abstracted, generalized politeness1 model ( Locher and Watts, 2005; Watts, 2003) in which politeness work in Korean is primarily concerned with relationship construction ( Arundale, 2006; Haugh, 2007c; Matsumoto, 1988). This will involve both a notion of face, conceived as a psychological, acquired construct, and a set of frames ( Terkourafi, 2005) that do not directly reference face. To arrive at this theoretical point, the paper begins by examining the social factors that influence choices in apology forms as predicted by Brown and Levinson (1987). Brown and Levinson's model accurately predicts the relevance of many factors in form selection in Korean, such as relative power, social distance, and the severity of the act. However, the model itself is not an accurate model for Korean even in high abstraction. Instead of choosing a strategy based upon the weight of a face-threatening act, Koreans actively manage and create expectations for behavior in a relationship. Some expectations will resemble classic positive and negative face issues, while others will more directly reference culture-specific roles or common events.