A linguistic analysis of lying in negative evaluations: The speech act performance of Chinese learners of Korean

Abstract

The current study is concerned with cross-cultural speech actperformance, specifically focusing on the performance of lying in situations where the speakers perceive or adopt a negative evaluation. The current study shows that more lies are found in the Korean native speaker group than the Chinese learner group. Also, lies are more frequent in situations where evaluations target people than in situations where evaluations target an entity. However, the number of lies is not directly correlated to changes in the relative social distance and power between the speaker and hearer. Moreover, the fact that the preference of different lying strategies also differs between the two groups may imply some differences in terms of cultural awareness.