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Linguistic Politeness in Korean: Phonetics and Multimodality

Monday October 6, 3:30pm in Browsing Room, Knight Library

Talk by Bodo Winter (University of California, Merced) with commentaries from Lucien Brown (University of Oregon) and Kaori Idemaru (University of Oregon)

Jeremiah Lecture presented by CAPS and EALL

Abstract: Politeness is a crucial aspect of social life and culture. Bodo Winter’s talk will argue that politeness is much more than a set of hedges and norms that one ought to say in particular situations. Instead, politeness may also affect the manner of speaking, the tone of voice, social distance and body language. Bodo Winter will discuss evidence from Korean which shows that politeness manifests itself in speech acoustics (pitch, loudness, rate of speaking, tone of voice), and that this manifestation has measurable effects on Korean listeners. Preliminary evidence from a cross-cultural listening task reveal that some aspects of what is perceived as vocal politeness may be shared with other cultures, although interesting cross-cultural differences prevail. The evidence from Korean points to a picture of politeness that is much richer than just honorifics and verbal expressions, and it points to a view of politeness that is inherently embodied and multimodal.