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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.688-706
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 May 2026
Received 01 Apr 2026 Revised 27 Apr 2026 Accepted 14 May 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202605.688

The Distribution of Politeness Under Power Asymmetry: A Comparative Study of Korean and U.S. Business Request Emails

Sanghee Park
(First author) Guest Professor, Department of International Office Administration Ewha Womans University 52, Ewhayeodae-gil, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, 03760, Republic of Korea, Tel: +82-2-3277-2733 sanghee.park@ewha.ac.kr


© 2026 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study examines how professionals organize politeness in English business request emails under different power relations. The data include 120 discourse completion task emails written by Korean and U.S. professionals, comparing peer- and superior-directed requests across subject lines, head acts, and supportive moves. Politeness strategies were coded at the sub-strategy level within Brown and Levinson’s politeness framework. The findings show that hierarchical power did not consistently increase indirectness in the request head act. Instead, power was more clearly reflected in where writers placed politeness work within the email. The statistically clearest Korean-U.S. contrast appeared in the head act: U.S. participants more often built mitigation into the request itself through question- and hedge-based forms, whereas Korean participants showed greater reliance on efficiency-oriented or conventionally indirect formulations depending on the power condition. In supportive moves, cultural differences were not statistically significant; these strategies were more clearly shaped by power relations within both groups. Politeness in business request emails therefore operates at the level of discourse organization, not solely within individual request forms. Sub-strategy analysis revealed patterns that broader strategy categories did not make visible.

Keywords:

politeness, power relations, business email discourse, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2025S1A5B5A17013617).

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