Korean Honorifics and Politeness in Second Language Learning

Complaint sequences across proficiency levels: the contribution of pragmatics and multimodality

“…Since the late 1970s, different politeness theories have been advanced within the field of pragmatics in an attempt to explain the conventions of language use (Barron, 2003). Providing an accurate definition of politeness, however, appears to be a rather complex issue, and most researchers tend to agree with the idea that politeness is part of the affective aspects of interaction and that it is related to the notion of face (Brown andLevinson, 1978, 1987;Kasper, 1990Kasper, , 2009bWatts, 2003;Geyer, 2008).…”

“…Following Olshtain and Weinbach (1987), the complainer expresses displeasure or annoyance towards a particular action affects him/her unfavourably. Due to the face threating nature of complaints (Brown andLevinson, 1978, 1987), it is complex to utter them as their performance might affect negatively speakers' relationship. Speakers, and particularly complainers, should require specific pragmatic knowledge so as to approach the complainee and express complaints in a way that interlocutors are not damaged.…”

“…Specifically, it focuses on how different social variables such as power or status, social distance and rank of imposition or severity of offence (Brown andLevinson, 1978, 1987) affect language use. Then, as indicated by Thomas (1983, p. 99), sociopragmatics involves "the social conditions placed on language in use".…”

“…This particular speech act can be classified as a facethreatening act (FTA) (Brown andLevinson, 1978, 1987). Complaints are performed when the speaker perceives that a particular offence has been committed.…”

“…Therefore, the rationale behind the selection of the speech act of complaints and responses to complaints is based on: (1) the facethreating nature of the speech act of complaints (Brown andLevinson, 1978, 1987); (2) the complexity the complaints and responses to complaints presents due to the lack of prototypical discourse functions (Laforest, 2002;Geluykens and Kraft, 2008); and (3) the linguistic and pragmatic complexity that complaints and responses to complaints may represent for language learners.…”