Abstract

In the same context, native English speakers tend to say they feel “guilty” or “embarrassed” while native Korean speakers would say they feel “ashamed.” How would Korean-English bilinguals express their emotions in the same context? If their verbal expressions differ between the languages, would it be because they experience different emotions based on the language that they use? In support of Grosjean’s (2008) stance that bilinguals are not two monolingual individuals in one body, my PhD research tackles the issue of bilinguals’ emotional experiences and verbal expressions, and investigates Korean-English bilinguals’ emotion talk in shame-evoking situations in English-speaking and Korean-speaking contexts. My MPhil work is used as a pilot study, which compared four Korean–English bilinguals’ experiences and verbal expressions of shame between Korean and English contexts. These bilinguals experienced more shame and employed more diverse shame words more frequently when speaking Korean than English.