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Obligation and reader involvement in English and Korean science popularizations: a corpus-based cross-cultural text analysis

Abstract Most research on English/Korean cross-cultural text analysis has focused on comparing the discourse organization of academic texts written by English native speakers and ESL learners. However, this provides a limited view of the textual differences between the two cultures. In the present research, we analyze a genre with a mass readership—newspaper science popularization texts—from an interpersonal perspective. Using two corpora of 356 British and Korean newspaper articles, we investigated modal expressions of obligation. Analytical categories were devised based on two aspects: “who is imposing the obligation?” (“the obligation-imposer”) and “on whom the obligation is imposed?” (“the obligation-imposed”). The analysis shows differences in the ways in which obligation is imposed on the reader in the two corpora. The English writers depend more on third-person scientific experts as “the obligation-imposer,” and tend to specify “the obligation-imposed” explicitly. In contrast, the Korean writers are more likely to impose obligation in their own persona, and to represent the “obligation-imposed” implicitly. We explore in what ways these differences can be seen as reflecting cultural norms, focusing especially on the individualism and task-orientedness that are held to be characteristic of Western cultures as opposed to the collectivism and relation-orientedness of Korean culture.