[20090828] Lecture 2 Reflection

Today's topic was Speech Acts, especially 'compliments and responses'.
While the activity, which we filled out our discourse completion paper and compared them with group members, I found a lot of interesting points which are hidden in my compliment responses.

Different from the research result that professor showed us, the class members accepted compliments a lot, which is close to the western way of response to compliment. However, to the four compliments on the paper, I had 2 accepting only, and the others were 'Thanking and Denigrating'. Because I am from Korea and my country belongs to a part of Eastern culture, it was not a surprising result.

However, while I was analyzing datas, I thought that, for me, the result can be different according to the language that I use at the moment. My mother tongue is Korean. If someone gives me a compliment in Korean, I would not accept it and denigrate it. For example, if someone says "너 오늘 무척 예쁘다.(Neo Oneul Mucheok Yebbda ; You look pretty today.)", than I would reply "아, 아니에요.(Ah, anieyo. ; Oh, no, I'm not.)". On the other hand, if someone compliments me in English, like "You look pretty today.", then I would accept it saying "Thank you. You look great, too.".

As I concluded, this kind of difference is related to the language and the culture in it. When I'm using Korean, I speak and act in a way that corresponds with Korean language or culture. However, when I speak English, I fit my behaviors or thoughts into a way of English speakers'. It can be discussed as 'language identity' that I'm studying these days in my major class.

There are many connections between this GEK module and my major module 'Social Variation in English'. Therefore, I hope to learn a lot about language which is related to social contexts, by combining all the knowledge that I get in the two modules.


+) It's my first time making my blog and publishing posts in English.
So there can be a lot of mistakes, but I'll try my best to get better and better!