A Quantitative Analysis of Collaborative Action in Korean and English Conversation: Interaction between Language and Culture

Abstract

This paper explores how the speakers of Korean and English collaborate with each other when they construct their stories together as they attempt to organize a set of fifteen pictures into a coherent story. I examined data from 10 pairs of Korean and English speakers respectively. In particular, I examined four different categories of collaborative action in this study: (a) phrasal or mono-clausal co-construction, (b) multi-clausal co-construction, (c) repetition, and (d) overlapping repetition. The results show that the Korean speakers used all of the four categories much more frequently than the English speakers. This seems to suggest that the Korean speakers are more interdependent and mind-sharing, thus placing themselves in an inseparable field. The wide divergencies shown between Korean and English seem to suggest that the existing basic assumptions about human interaction, where two independent rational conversationalists share the goal of the exchange of information, should be revised according to a wider perspective based on the underlying cultural practices of the language users.