Politeness and Culture in Second Language Acquisition

Brown and Levinson (1987) developed a universal politeness theory that posits distance, power, and task imposition together to determine politeness weightiness perception. However, their theory overlooks the importance of cultural differences in politeness behavior. Furthermore, the theory mathematically formularizes that politeness weightiness perception is determined by simply adding social distance between the speaker and the hearer with social power (status) of the hearer (addressee) and task imposition. In this book, I refine the theory by developing a formal model while accounting for cultural differences and empirically test them using survey data obtained from subjects with Korean and American cultural background. The results reveal that cultural differences do matter in a speaker’s determination of politeness weightiness.