Service customers influence the quality of service outcome through their role in the service delivery process. As a way of informing customers of their role and motivating customers to play the role well, service providers often use auditory announcements. However, how to design an effective announcement for service customers still remains largely under-studied. To fill this gap in the research, the current study examines the impact of humor in a service announcement on customer intention to comply with the announced message. Specifically, we examine the impact of two humor design factors: location of humor in the announcement and the degree of message-relatedness of the humor. Further, we explore the structure of the impact of humor on customer intention to comply. We propose that the two design elements of humor will first influence the degree of customer perceptions of funniness of the announcement, which will influence the degrees of customer attention to the announcement and customer memory of the message, which will eventually influence customer intention to comply with the message. To empirically examine our hypotheses, we conducted a two (positions of humor: beginning versus ending of the announcement) by two (message relatedness of humor: strong versus weak) between-subject experiment. The context of our experiment was college students’ course evaluation. In the message, listeners were asked to participate in an online evaluation of the course which they were taking. Pre-recorded messages were played to students at the beginning of five different sections of one particular course at a business school in a major university in Seoul, Korea. The results of an ANCOVA analysis demonstrated the significant impact of both humor position in the message and the message-relatedness of the humor. A structural equation modeling analysis showed that perceived funniness influence customer attention to the announcement but not customer memory of the message. The degree of customer attention, in turn, influenced customer intention to comply with the announced message.

This paper examines aspects of the acceptance and identity of Hanja (Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation) in the Korean society, and analyzes the literal and social mechanism employed for continued acceptance by the Korean public. The analysis illuminates insight into the social status and recognition of Hanja in the Korean society. In the ancient Korean society, Hanja was identified as a textual existence dominating the thoughts of the intellectuals and reproducing knowledge. Though its stature and status of the past are no longer present, Hanja still retains a remnant of their past stature in the contemporary Korean culture. In Korea’s popular culture, Hanja is used in various kinds of notices, signs, trademarks, and advertisements. In the consumer market, in particular, Hanja represents the Oriental sentiments and beauty and traditional authority, surpassing the realm of the text beyond borders of the elegant (􆘆) or the folksy (􁼘) to the level of an iconic entity of knowledge, whose symbolic images are used as marketing strategies in the consumer market.

This paper examines Korean learners’ difficulties with English unaccusative verb acquisition. 41 high school students, comprising the low proficiency group and 50 university students, constituting the high proficiency group, participated in judging two kinds of grammaticality tests (context-given and context-free). The first results revealed that at their English proficiency levels, context did not make any difference in judging the grammaticality of unaccusative verb. The second results showed that both groups of learners had more difficulty in acquiring melt-type (unaccusative verbs with transitive counterparts) than die-type (unaccusative verbs without transitive counterparts), and had the most difficulty unlearning NP-be+Ven structure of melt-type, followed by NP-V-NP structure of die-type and NP-be+Ven structure of die-type. It is suggested that the results of this study can be applied to learning and teaching unaccusative verbs in English classrooms and that future research focus on the possibility of advanced learners’ accepting nativelike NP-V order of unaccusative verbs.