Disrupting the indirectness Paradigm: Multilayered framework for request strategies in Korean drama.

This study reconceptualises directness and politeness in requests through a layered interactional model linking grammatical form, contextual stance, and moral evaluation across discourse. Rather than equating politeness with indirectness, it shows that requests are judged through situated negotiations of affect, entitlement, and responsibility, for which no corpus-scale model has existed.Analysing 939 requests from a Korean television drama, the study combines CCSARP coding with stance and sequential uptake analysis. Five configurations emerge: care-, authority-, and protective directness, alongside distanced indirectness and vulnerability-indexed hinting. Imperatives dominate where care, role responsibility, or urgency license decisive action, while indirect and off-record strategies cluster where entitlement is uncertain or risky.Directness, therefore, operates as a contextually authorised resource for relational alignment, not the opposite of politeness. By operationalising moral evaluation at the corpus scale, the study offers a transferable framework for analysing requests as layered relational actions across languages and settings.