Interpreting Korean Communication and Narrative

Interpreting Korean Communication and Narrative presents a ground-breaking framework for the cross-cultural analysis of Korean multimodal communication and narrative within its own cultural and linguistic contexts.

By combining rigorous formal methods rooted in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) with culturally grounded Korean socio-pragmatic primitives, the book provides Anglophone (culturally Western) researchers with the tools to decode the intricate interplay of verbal, non-verbal, and prosodic modalities that shape meaning in Korean narrative. Through extensive analysis and data collection of 169 extracts from South Korean films, this study shows how these socio-pragmatic expressions function systematically within Korean social hierarchies and cultural contexts, revealing conventions of communication which are often invisible to foreign viewers. The development of the Korean Segmented Film Discourse Representation Theory (K-SFDRT) and its system of graphical representation in Korean Segmented Film Discourse Structures (K-SFDRS) represents a major advance in multimodal research, offering a formal, replicable, and culturally contextualised methodology that decolonises research of Korean media, arts, and communication. It sets a new standard for multimodal research, providing a pioneering approach to understanding the dynamics of narrative and interaction in culturally rich contexts.

Making visible the role of multimodal honorifics in South Korean narrative cohesion, Interpreting Korean Communication and Narrative offers key insights to researchers and graduate students of film, translation, Korean studies, and multimodal communication.