“What Does Hyung Mean Please?”: Moments of Teaching and Learning About Korean (Im)politeness on an Online Streaming Platform of Korean TV Drama

Abstract

In this paper we combine an interest in the pragmatics of fiction with interpersonal pragmatics by exploring how Korean (im)politeness norms surface and are negotiated in fictional TV drama. Our data is derived from the streaming platform Viki.com, which allows viewers to comment on the episodes they stream. Building on previous work by (Locher, Journal of Pragmatics 170:139–155, 2020), we first report on the pervasive occurrence of scenes containing ‘moments of relational work’ in Korean TV drama and then explore how viewers comment on this very relational work. While our quantitative results show that viewers do indeed pick up on (im)politeness negotiations (in linguistic and embodied, multimodal form), this finding is relativized by the many other functions that the comments also have. Nevertheless, we are able to show question–answer sequences about relational work and identity ‘moments of teaching and learning’ about Korean (im)politeness in this online fan community.