This volume demonstrates how inductive research into speakers' metapragmatic knowledge offers a path for researching what politeness means for language users and how this reshapes politeness theory. Through bottom-up analysis of interview data collected from Korean speakers from two generations, the authors map out a participant-oriented perspective on politeness and use these findings to build new theoretical models. The results shows that politeness is a multimodal practice tied up with maintaining emotional attunement and engaging in acts of upkeeping or contesting social conventions. The book features a thorough overview of extant research in the field, three in-depth data analysis chapters and a detailed discussion of the results. By focusing on the culture-specific and empirically grounded ways that language users understand politeness, the book contributes to current trends in im/politeness research, notably "third wave" approaches that view politeness as a culturally embedded social action. Moreover, the book lays the groundwork for researching metapragmatics via interview data that can be applied to other languages and aspects of pragmatics. This book is a must-read for scholars and students of politeness research, pragmatics, linguistics and cultural studies.
Lucien Brown is Korea Foundation Associate Professor in Korean Studies at Monash University. Prior to joining Monash in January 2018, he worked at University of Oregon, USA (2011-2017). He obtained his PhD in Korean Language Research from SOAS University of London, UK (2008). Lucien Brown's research looks at politeness and pragmatics in first- and second-language contexts. His publication highlights include the monograph Korean Honorifics and Politeness in Second Language (John Benjamins, 2011) and the co-edited volume Multimodal Im/politeness (John Benjamins, 2023). He has also published extensively in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Politeness Research and Gesture. He is an Associate Editor of Journal of Pragmatics, and Editor of Korean Linguistics.
Soung-U Kim is a tenure-track lecturer in Korean Studies at Università di Napoli L'Orientale. Before his freelance work in Berlin as a Korean-language professional (2021-2023, e.g. for companies such as DeepL or Jung von Matt), he worked as a postdoctoral Research Fellow at SOAS University of London (2016-2021). He obtained his Ph.D. in Linguistics (2018) researching the syntax of Jejuan, a minority language of South Korea, and documenting Jejuan conversations in an ELDP-funded project. Apart from minority language description and documentation, his interests lie in studying linguistic ideologies, linguistic nationalism, power and inductive-qualitative research methodologies, with a focus on Korean-speaking communities. He is a co-author of an edited volume on Linguistic Obsolescence in East Asia (Brill 2022), and has published papers on Jejuan grammar in SNU's Language Research (2018), Japanese-Korean Linguistics (2022), as well as co-authored papers with Lucien Brown and Hyunji Kim in journals such as Journal of Politeness Research (2022).
