Self-repair in Korean conversation

Abstract

This paper analyses the practice of self-initiated (same-turn) self-repair in Korean conversation, from a conversation-analytic perspective, with the focus on “post-positionally” conducted morphological repair. Korean is a predicate-final language with an agglutinative system, where a case marker or a sentence-ending suffix post-positionally marking the root (e.g., noun or verb stem) may become a repairable, being replaced by another, rearticulated, or even suppressed or blurred (in the case of turn-finally occurring repair). The analysis suggests that post-positional repair of the root or suffixes (e.g., sentence-ending suffixes or turn-final clausal connectives) embodies the repairer’s orientation towards rendering the action more “normatively appropriate” in a way that is more recipient-designed, face-sensitive, or solidary. Explicating the reflexive relationship between the repairable and the repair solution is shown to be a useful comparative-analytic practice, illuminating the way post-positional morphosyntactic elements in Korean are deployed as paradigmatically related interactional resources managing action, face and relationships