2027 Summer Research Program

Duration: 6 weeks (11 January to 19 February 2027)
Hours of engagement: 24 hours per week
Delivery mode: Hybrid (on-site and online)
Location: School of Languages and Cultures, UQ St Lucia.

This project investigates regional and social variation in three speech acts in Korean: apologies, expressions of gratitude, and requests. Speech acts are central to interpersonal communication, yet their realisation differs across dialect regions, generations, and social contexts. Building on an ongoing program of variational pragmatics research, the project examines how speakers from different regions of South Korea (including Seoul, Gyeongsang, Choongcheong and Jeolla) construct and sequence these speech acts, and how such variation reflects broader patterns of politeness and relational work in Korean discourse. The student will work with discourse completion task (DCT) data and/or naturally occurring conversational data, contributing to the coding, categorisation, and preliminary analysis of speech act strategies. The project offers a structured entry point into sociopragmatic and discourse-analytic methods, situating the student’s work within an active research program.

Students will assist with organising and coding existing DCT and/or conversational data for the target speech acts, applying an established coding scheme under supervision. Tasks include checking transcriptions, categorising speech act strategies (e.g. head acts, mitigators, intensifiers), and tcoding patterns by region, age, or gender. Students will also read foundational literature in variational pragmatics and speech act theory to contextualise the data and will explore a specific sub-question within the broader dataset for a short written summary.

Students will gain practical skills in discourse and pragmatic data coding, familiarity with core concepts in speech act theory, politeness theory, and variational pragmatics, and experience applying a structured analytic framework to authentic language data. Through close engagement with Korean-language material, they will also deepen their understanding of speech acts and politeness as realised in Korean sociocultural context. They will also develop skills in academic reading, data organisation, and written summary of findings, providing a foundation for future research in linguistics or related fields.

By the end of the project, students will have produced a coded subset of speech act data ready for further analysis, and a short written report summarising patterns observed in their assigned sub-question. This output may contribute to an ongoing paper within the supervisor's dialect pragmatics research program.

This project suits UQ students with high proficiency in Korean and an interest in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, or discourse analysis. Suitable disciplines include linguistics, Asian studies, or related humanities and social science programs. Attention to detail and comfort working with qualitative and simple quantitative data are valuable.

The project will be supervised by Dr Narah Lee, School of Languages and Cultures, UQ. Students will work directly with Dr Lee within her ongoing research program on Korean regional dialects and discourse analysis.

Depending on interest and contribution, students may be acknowledged in publications or conference presentations arising from the broader research program.

Applicants must have intermediate or above proficiency in Korean, sufficient to read and work with authentic Korean-language data

Yes, students may contact the supervisor before applying.

Direct enquiries to: narah.lee@uq.edu.au