Grammar and stance: The use of Korean interrogative suffixes –nya and –ni as alignment markers

Abstract

This study investigates the stance-related functions of –nya and –ni in Korean conversation within the theoretical and analytical framework of stance proposed by Du Bois (2007) as well as that of conversation analysis. Previous studies have understood –nya and –ni as plain-speech level sentence-type markers that are employed to form interrogative sentences mainly intended to seek information. This study, however, demonstrates that –nya and –ni can function as stance markers that show how the speaker aligns his/her stance with the stance displayed by the prior speaker. The findings of this study further show that –nya and –ni are starkly different in the types of stances they index: –nya tended to indicate the speaker's divergent stance with the prior speaker's stance, whereas –ni tended to indicate a convergent stance. The grammaticalization of stance alignment into the interrogative suffixes –nya and –ni in Korean thus clearly demonstrates how grammar is not only a resource to indicate the syntactic and propositional information of an utterance but also a socio-interactional and public resource that enables the dialogic construction of stance in and through interaction.