A Cross-cultural Study of Responses to Offensive Situations

Abstract

Although Korean and English speech act studies have increased in quantity, a closer look revealed some limitations from qualitative perspectives. Many speech act studies employed similar data collection that draw on similar coding systems and investigated speech acts between Koreans as non-native speakers and native speakers of English. For this reason, similar findings were consistently reported from the literature. This study examines two data sets collected from Koreans and Americans as native speakers. The study also examines diverse responses occurring in six different scenarios and considers cultural-social factors in the linguistic realization of apology. Results indicate cross-cultural differences are found in the use of non-apologies and non-verbal behavior which are missing from the previous studies. Secondly, contextual factors like social relationships and offense types are likely to affect the choice of language between Korean and English speech apologies. The study concludes a substantial comparison needs to expand kinds of speech acts in order to understand intercultural communication.