“Some people hated your speech”: scalar inferences in face-threatening contexts by L1 Korean speakers

Brown and Levinson (1987) proposed the Politeness Theory, developing the concept of ‘face’ that Erving Goffman (1967) first introduced. Brown and Levinson (1987) argued that humans have two faces; a positive face and a negative face. Specifically, a negative face is a desire not to have personal rights violated by others. Therefore, humans adapt various strategies to ensure that the other person does not feel they have been taken advantage of. These various strategies which appeal to someone’s negative face are defined as negative politeness by Brown and Levinson (1987). In contrast, the various actions that damage others’ positive and negative faces are named face-threatening acts.

Due to the development of experimental pragmatics in the recent twenty years, linguists could provide empirical evidence of theoretical works. Bonnefon et al. (2011) is one of the representative studies conducted based on Brown and Levinson (1987)’s Politeness Theory. Bonnefon et al. (2011) asked participants to read speech vignettes in two conditions (face-threatening and face-boosting). Then participants responded to semantic compatibility questions, “Is it possible that everybody hated [loved] your speech?” The result indicated that people tend to interpret ‘some’ as at least some, possibly all, in a face-threatening context. Moreover, Bonnefon et al. (2011) argued that the delay in response time occurs when people read the face-threatening speech vignettes, precisely when they derive scalar inference of ‘some.’ After a few years, Mazzarella et al. (2018) revisited the study of Bonnefon et al. (2011) to rebut the idea that response time delay occurs while reading speech vignettes. The experiments from Mazzarella et al. (2018) proved that the delay in response time occurs while people go through epistemic assessments, i.e., thinking of the answers to semantic compatibility questions.

However, these previous studies from Bonnefon et al. (2011) and Mazzarella et al. (2018) have been conducted only in English with native English speakers. It remains a question whether the response time delay in a face-threatening context is a cross-linguistically universal phenomenon. Indeed, no empirical studies have been conducted with L1 Korean speakers to verify response time delay in a face-threatening context in Korean.

This study will investigate the response time of L1 Korean speakers in two contexts (face-boosting and face-threatening) while reading the given speech vignettes and answering the semantic compatibility questions. The experiment will be divided into two phases. The first phase will be conducted with speech vignettes written in casual speech, while the second will be conducted with speech vignettes written in honorifics. The results from the study will address whether the response time delay in a face-threatening context is cross-linguistically universal. It will also demonstrate whether the honorifics in Korean affect the derivation of scalar inference of ‘some,’ resulting in more delay in response time or not. Furthermore, the results will guide L2 Korean learners to understand better how L1 Korean speakers interpret ‘some’ in a face-threatening context. L2 Korean speakers may understand the necessity of adapting strategies to protect opponents’ faces from indicating that ‘some’ does not mean ‘possibly all.’

References:

Bonnefon, J., De Neys, W., & Feeney, A. (2011). Processing Scalar Inferences in Face-Threatening Contexts. Proceedings of Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 33(33), 3389-3394.

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.

Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face behaviour. Penguin.

Mazzarella, D., Trouche, E., Mercier, H., & Noveck, I. (2018). Believing What You’re Told: Politeness and Scalar Inferences. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(908), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00908