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

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 If 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 11 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.