한국언어과학회

As COVID-19 has spread around the world, people’s fear has turned into anger and they have started to blame each other for the devastating disease. The purpose of this study is to analyze English and Korean online comments to attribute blame for the virus. This paper examines subtypes of blame, the direction of blame, and the degree of explicitness of blame based on cultural differences. A total of 338 English and Korean accusations were collected and they included subtypes of blame such as sarcasm, insults, slanders, reproaches, anger, maledictions, and threats. Korean blame was also mainly directed towards outgroups, especially China, the possible origin of COVID-19 because of the history of epidemics and anti-Chinese sentiment. Furthermore, Korean blame had higher levels of explicitness than English accusations because Korean people preferred to discuss issues in online social networks without any identification. As the COVID-19 blame game has intensified, this pragmatic approach may provide a broader understanding of placing blame.