Professor: Miok Pak
Department: East Asian Languages and Literatures
Title: Linguistic politeness, culture and society: An interdisciplinary study of language, culture and society
Description: The linguistic competency is often considered to consist only of speaking, listening, reading and writing proficiencies that enable speakers to communicate. However, in recent approaches to second language teaching and learning, these skills have been pushed to backdrop by Five C’s – Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Communities. The rationale is that what is more important than these skills is the interpersonal, interpretive and presentational aspects in language learning. The Five C’s has become the national standards for world language education and has changed the direction and focus of all foreign language teaching with the understanding that when learners are engaged in the activities that focus on these aspects, more effective learning takes place. In the heart of Five C’s lies the perception and understanding of a close and entwined relationship among language, culture and society. Some languages are more evident than others in manifesting such relation and Korean is one of them. That language is a direct reflection of culture and society is evident in the expression of politeness manifested in various facets of the grammar in Korean, e.g., in pronouns, honorific nouns and verbs, and speech style particles. The grammatical expressions of politeness are reflections of a hierarchical and collectivist Korean society, and it is interesting to see that any changes in the society and culture yield changes in the expression of politeness. For example, the super polite speech style which was used until Chosun dynasty (until late 1800’s) became lost as the Korean society moved away from stratified class society. With this background, the goal of this project is to study the changes in the grammatical politeness in modern Korean. Korea is well known to be a dynamically changing and fast-paced society and is undergoing changes everyday. Boosted by the globalized environment, the value orientation of
people is changing relatively to egalitarian and individualistic consciousness. At the same time, with the rise of materialism and capitalism, the status of customers in sales and service areas is constantly rising. Such changes are directly and immediately affecting the grammatical expression of politeness in the Korean language. Hence, the customers are addressed with the utmost expression of politeness, and as illustration, one often sees and hears even coffee for customers being referred to with honorific expressions. Hence, it would be interesting to undertake a study on the changes occurring in the language from such perspective. Not only the result of this study can be incorporated in teaching in classes but also will likely yield a research on socio-linguistic study of politeness.
Duties: Find relevant papers and research on the topic of language and politeness and summarize the content of the most relevant work
Time commitment: 4-6 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 2
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: pakm@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.
Skip to content
University Honors Program Blog
Intellectual Omnivores Unite
