earticle

영어

There has been growing interest in defamation and insult laws in South Korea because many people can easily post malicious comments with the increasing use of the Internet. However, there is a lack of linguistic evidence to determine whether statements are defamatory. For this reason, there are instances where two similar expressions lead to different results in defamation and insult cases. The purpose of this study is to examine several contextual factors including participants, speech acts, medium, conveyed meaning, style, setting, grammatical referencing, malicious language, co-text, and discourse structure, applying Harkess (1996) and Shuy (2010). To determine defamatory meaning, it is important to consider the illocutionary force of speakers’ speech act, the perlocutionary effect on hearers, the use of defamatory words, implied meaning, and framing. It also analyzes defamation and insult precedents in South Korea using linguistic tools, which show that language evidence may help resolve legal disputes.