Language Use between Parents and Daughter: Speech Styles and Politeness Strategies in When Life Gives You Tangerines

Abstract

This study set out to determine which speech style appear in the conversations between Geum-myeong and her parents in the Korean drama When Life Gives You Tangerines, using Joo’s (1967) theory, and to examine the politeness strategies that emerge in those exchanges through Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. The data were drawn from the drama’s official Netflix release (2025), with the English subtitle transcript as the main source. Only conversations between Geum-myeong and her parents were sampled, provide 28 conversation data sets made up of 338 dialogue lines, and each line was treated as a single unit of analysis. The researchers themselves were the main instrument, aided by the subtitle transcript, and the study followed a descriptive qualitative approach. For the analysis, the conversations were first transcribed. Each utterance was then classified according to Joos’s five speech styles and Brown and Levinson’s four politeness strategies, and the percentages were calculated using the formula P=F/N×100%. Only two were found out of the five speech styles, such as casual style (191 lines, 56.51%) and intimate style (147 lines, 43.49%). Frozen, formal, and consultative styles did not occur. As for politeness, positive politeness was used most often (151 lines, 44.67%), followed by off record (129 lines, 38.17%), bald on record (42 lines, 12.43%), and negative politeness (16 lines, 4.73%). Familiarity and emotional closeness shape the way Geum-myeong and her parents talk to each other and that speaking style and politeness complement each other in family communication shows the results of the study. In addition, closeness did not remove indirectness, because sensitive matters such as financial worries and emotional needs were often expressed through off-record expressions.