The interaction of politeness systems in Korean learners of French

This paper investigates how the French second person pronouns, tu and vous, are acquired by Korean learners of French. This is specifically approached from an interlanguage pragmatics research viewpoint, focusing upon the status of the learners’ pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge (whether they are explicit or implicit). It is hypothesized that Korean learners of French will face difficulties acquiring vous, but not with tu due to the similarities between French and Korean second person pronoun use in requests, mediated by their implicit/explicit knowledge. Using a discourse completion task and an error correction task, the findings support the hypothesis, showing the interplay between language transfer and their second language developmental status. Moreover, this was detectible by using a combination of tasks which allows pinpointing of knowledge used. The implications for explicit/implicit knowledge status in relation to the use of pragmatic knowledge are discussed against the degree of control learners have over tu and vous.