The present study aims to investigate the patterns and characteristics of impoliteness strategies and impoliteness formulas in Korean learners’ interlanguage complaints, focusing primarily on advanced Chinese learners. Discourse Completion Test(DCT) was utilized to investigate interlanguage complaints, with each scenario providing the research participants with information on publicness, familiarities between the interlocutors, and their social status levels. Impoliteness, as well as politeness, were examined. In the meantime, the effect of those three factors above on the selecting impoliteness strategies or politeness strategies were also investigated. According to the results of the patterns of impoliteness strategies, learners were more inclined to use impoliteness strategies in private scenarios compared to those public scenarios, to hearers with equal or lower social status compared to those with higher social status, and to familiar hearers compared to those unfamiliar. In terms of the characteristics of impoliteness formulas, learners showed a high proportion of bald-on impoliteness strategies in all the 12 scenarios. Secondly, some of the learners failed to use honorifics in certain scenarios, damaging decencies of their hearers and even in being regarded as interlocutors with improper manners. Lastly, most of the learners neglected negative politeness, which is by no means less important that its positive counterpart.

This article aims to reveal the boundary between humor and murye/bulson. Murye/bulson and humor are one of the inferences aspects of conversational implicature. Mechanisms to consider murye/bulson as humor present as follows: multiple indirectness and virtual world in the contexts understood to be untrue, existences sympathized within familiarity, conversions of implicature, setting, relation and area. These mechanisms permit to deviate from individual responsibility and offset murye/bulson. On the other hand, according to bulson implicature, there are situational·relational conditions that humor is not allowed any more as humor: Korea's sensitive topics cling to previous negative situations·emotions, invasion of privacy against expected values, gender inequality, class distinction, neglecting the weak, disparagement of appearance violating the limit of emotions and disregarding status.