Korean Conversation Research Articles

Turn formats for other-initiated repair and their relation to trouble sources: Some observations from Japanese and Korean conversations

Intended as a contribution to our understanding of the principles underlying the selection of turn formats used for other-initiated repair (OIR), this study explores the relationship between OIR turn formats involving the “what” token in Japanese and Korean and the types of trouble addressed by them. We focus in particular on the differentiation between “open class repair initiators” (Drew, 1997) and OIR that targets a specific referential element in the trouble-source turn. We show that, while prosody plays an important role in distinguishing the two in Korean, it does not in Japanese. Instead, Japanese speakers rely on grammatical resources, in particular postpositional particles, to accomplish the differentiation. We also discuss one type of OIR turn format in Japanese, nani ga (‘what’ followed by the nominative particle ga), whose workings deviate from those of all the other OIR turn formats consisting of “what” followed by a postpositional particle. We suggest that nani ga has undergone a process of pragmatic specialization and that, as a result, it is treated by speakers as an unanalyzed chunk used for specific pragmatic purposes.

Answering questions about the unquestionable in Korean conversation

Conversation analytic studies have shown many dynamic ways of answering and resisting questions across languages. This study identifies a routine practice in Korean with which recipients indicate problems with questions, and it explains the role of the delimiter particle ya ‘of course’ in displaying resistance. Examinations of the sequential environments in which ya occurs demonstrate that traditional accounts of ya as an emphatic marker fail to capture its interactional import. In responses to questions, recipients commonly use ya to overtly stress the evident nature of a matter, and thus display resistance toward questions that (a) inquire about unquestionable matters that the questioner should not have asked about or doubted; (b) raise an obvious thus pointless matter that is ancillary or off the sequential track; or (c) inquire about referents that are obviously irrelevant. As a delimiter particle, ya can be attached to any of several specific linguistic elements to pick out particular aspects of a matter; this feature allows the recipients to problematize those aspects of a question rather than the whole question itself. With a simple attachment of ya, recipients walk a fine line between addressing problems in questions and answering them. This study sheds new light on the interactional import of delimiter particles.

Reshaping the response space with kulenikka in beginning to respond to questions in Korean conversation

Respondents have various ways of resisting the constraints that questions impose on them. In this article I show one way in which Korean speakers deal with trouble of responding to questions as put when beginning to respond: Prefacing their responses with kulenikka. The analysis shows that kulenikka marks the response as departing from the question's terms and signals a reshaping of the response space. Three common contexts for this departure are: Respondents (1) cannot conform to the question's terms due to the question's inadequate presuppositions; (2) defer a straightforward or type-conforming answer; and (3) evade the question. The findings contribute to a developing body of conversation analytic research on how question recipients display resistance to questions, and more generally how turn-beginnings serve as an important place in interaction.

Negotiating epistemic rights to information in Korean conversation: An examination of the Korean evidential marker –tamye

This study uses conversation analysis to investigate how participants in Korean conversations negotiate their epistemic rights to information by deploying alternate evidential markers. The participants mutually monitor each other’s different or changing epistemic rights to the information and routinely shift their choice of evidential markers to — tamye (‘I hear, isn’t it true?’) to redistribute their epistemic rights. By manipulating the turn-taking and sequence organizations which underlie the — tamye evidential marker, the participants can claim or downgrade their epistemic rights to the information. The findings of this study contribute to research on evidentiality by providing an interactional perspective which takes the orientation of the participants in actual interactions as the starting point of analysis. The study illustrates how evidential markers serve to negotiate the relationships among the speaker, the hearer, and the information in the course of the interaction rather than merely function to reflect an implicit contract or territory between the speaker’s and the hearer’s information.

The Sentence-Ending Suffix -Ketun in Korean Conversation with Reference to -Nuntey: Sequence Organization and Management of Epistemic Rights

From a conversation-analytic perspective (Sacks et al. 1974), this paper reports on the sequential analysis of the Korean sentence-ending suffix -ketun in spontaneous conversation conducted in comparison with -nuntey. The recurrent sequence-organizational pattern in which -ketun is deployed pre-positionally (i.e., as the first pair part in pre-sequence) or within a multi-unit turn as a parenthetical insert is analyzed as being motivated by the practice of mitigating the strong epistemic claim made by the speaker of -ketun. In such positions, the speaker's claim of his/her epistemic rights indexed by -ketun is managed sequentially by way of requiring the recipient's attention only in passing. These positions contrast with the position where the ketun-utterance is used as the second pair part; it requires the full attention of the interlocutor (i.e., the speaker of the first pair part), which accounts for why the use of -ketun in the second position tends to be perceived as impolite. The sequential pattern where -ketun is embedded often contains a nuntey-utterance, which, sometimes prefaced by a discourse marker such as ku(le)ntey but or kulaykaciko so, contributes to linking the preceding segment of talk initiated by -ketun forward to the projected main telling. This sequential position associated with -nuntey attests to what may be called the de-pressurizing role that it plays; -nuntey serves as a resource for orienting the recipient forward away from the domain where the speaker's epistemic authority is asserted with -ketun. The implications of the findings for the comparison of -ketun and -nuntey are further discussed in relation to the practice of self-repair by which one form is replaced by another. The pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed with regard to the need to develop grammar more reflective of the features of authentic language in terms of sequential structures and actions.

A Study of University Students' Different Communication Strategies in Korean and English Conversations

A Study of University Students' Different Communication Strategies in Korean and English Conversations

Structure Analysis of Request Phrases Used in Korean and Japanese Conversation: with Special Reference to Telephone Conversation between Friends

Structure Analysis of Request Phrases Used in Korean and Japanese Conversation: with Special Reference to Telephone Conversation between Friends

Questions and responses in Korean conversation

This study examines the question and response system in Korean conversation as part of a comparative project across 10 languages. Using conversation analysis as the primary methodology, this particular study analyzes 352 questions drawn from eight sets of naturally occurring conversations. Based on the analysis of these questions, this study provides an overview of the question and response system in Korean conversation; more specifically, various types of linguistic resources for questions, actions performed through questions, and types of responses to questions. It also discusses noteworthy aspects of actions and sequences compared to the other languages presented in this volume.

A Quantitative Analysis of Collaborative Action in Korean and English Conversation: Interaction between Language and Culture

A Quantitative Analysis of Collaborative Action in Korean and English Conversation: Interaction between Language and Culture

Invoking categories through co-present person reference: The case of Korean conversation

This article uses a conversation analytic framework to describe Korean speakers’ practices of co-present person reference by means of quasi-pronouns. In referring to a co-present party in a conversation, Korean speakers make use of demonstrative-based quasi-pronouns. While the proximal demonstrative is the default form to be used for this purpose, speakers often deploy the distinction between proximal versus distal demonstrative-based quasi-pronouns in order to display their category membership with respect to the referent (and the recipient), who is co-present in the interaction. Specifically, speakers refer to a co-present party with a distal demonstrative ce (‘that’)-based quasi-pronoun instead of a proximal demonstrative i (‘this’)-based one when they try to endow the referent with a different category membership than themselves, without respect to the actual physical distance between them. This study provides an interactional motivation for the observed referential practices, and also supports the stance that the characterizations of persons should be grounded in the participants’ own orientations in the interaction.

Sharedness of Information and the Sequential Structures in Korean Conversation

Sharedness of Information and the Sequential Structures in Korean Conversation

Sequential organization of post-predicate elements in Korean conversation

In this paper, various interactional features of turn-constructional unit (TCU) continuation as realized in Korean conversation through post-predicate elements are analyzed from a conversation-analytic perspective. Formulated as increments, post-predicate elements serve as re-completers by expanding the host TCU after it has reached a possible point of completion, which is explicitly marked by the utterance-final verb predicate. In many contexts of TCU continuation, the host TCU tends to be allusively constructed (e.g., in the form of a verb predicate with unexpressed arguments) and saliently indexical of the speaker’s affective stance, and post-predicate elements, mostly taking the form of ‘insertables’, elaborate the host TCU. TCU continuation is often realized when the action of the allusive host TCU is ‘disjunctively’ executed, with the interactional import of being potentially interruptive of the current talk-in-progress. Such an intrusive deployment of the host TCU, which is implicated in the practice of foregrounding the speaker’s collusively motivated responsive stance (e.g., in a confirmation request), is demonstrably oriented to by the speaker, who produces a post-predicate element as a methodic way of mitigating the disjunctive initiation of the prior action. The recipient also orients himself/herself to the potentially topic-derailing import associated with such a disjunctive initiation of action by way of initiating repair and/or promptly resuming his/her talk. As such, the production of a post-predicate element itself, mostly as an insertable that is grammatically and semantically related to the host, may not be directly attributed to interactional contingencies per se; it is often sequentially occasioned by practices geared towards enlivening the sequence being wrapped up, initiating or continuing an assessment sequence by way of highlighting the speaker’s evaluative stance turn-initially, or building the current turn on the prior turn through turn-tying operations. The interactional feature of post-predicate elements ‘re-doing the completion point as a transition-relevance place’ is partially manifested in the way the prosodic contour of the final or whole component of the host TCU is repeated and matched by that of the post-predicate elements.

Evidentiality in achieving entitlement, objectivity, and detachment in Korean conversation

Evidentiality has been extensively studied in linguistics for its function in coding the source of knowledge or for expressing the speaker’s attitude towards knowledge. However, few studies examine how evidential marking is sensitive and responsive to the unfolding talk and actions of the participants in social interaction. Analyzing audio and video data of naturally occurring conversations in Korean in a conversation analysis framework, this article demonstrates how the speaker often makes the choice of evidential marking or shifts the choice of evidential marking according to the participant’s response, achieving certain interactional functions. The speaker makes a strategic choice to use the experiential evidential marking -telako or shifts from zero-evidential marking to overt experiential evidential marking -telako for the same proposition to achieve entitlement, objectivity, or detachment regarding his claim. This study shows that, in social interaction, the choice of the speaker’s evidential marking is relative and interactively organized rather than static and predetermined.

Phrasal Unit Boundaries and Organization of Turns and Sequences in Korean Conversation

This paper examines an aspect of the grammar-interaction interface with respect to how participants orient to intra-turn phrasal unit boundaries as a locus that has interactional import for turn and sequence organization in Korean conversation. Phrasal unit boundaries in Korean serve as a space within a turn in which the speaker of the turn in-progress invites the recipient to acknowledge the speaker's point expressed up-to-that-point and collaboratively display his/her understanding thereof. In a sequentially and topically 'ripe' context, such unit boundaries often constitute places where more active participation on the part of the recipient is invited in the form of collaborative completion in which the recipient co-constructs the primary speaker's on-going turn. Phrasal unit boundaries also provide interactional resources which the speaker may exploit to sequentially delete out a problem in talk, e.g., by a sort of tying operation in which a subsequently added phrasal unit ties back to the speaker's previous utterance to the effect that the intervening talk containing a problem is canceled out by way of being shown to have been an interruption of the speaker's turn in-progress. This practice points to an aspect of the way in which the 'agglutinative' grammatical process involving the use of phrasal units shapes interactional patterns as observed in the course of organizing turns/sequences and managing problems in talk.

The Korean connective nuntey in conversational discourse

This paper examines the interactional use of the Korean connective nuntey in spontaneous conversational discourse in the framework of conversation analysis. Nuntey has mainly been discussed as a clause connector, linking a subordinate nuntey-clause to a main clause. As such it has been glossed as ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’, or ‘given that’. Using conversation analysis, this study reveals that nuntey-clauses often occur without main clauses in actual conversations and presents an analysis of this type of use: nuntey in these types of clauses provides background information as well as setting up an ‘accountability-relevance point’. In this way, nuntey-clauses without main clauses can frame interactionally delicate actions such as requests, disagreements and denials and allow the speakers to avoid explicitly stating their intentions — a characteristic which is highly valued in Korean conversation. The speaker can thus avoid saying the bottom-line and achieve ‘being indirect’. Also, nuntey-clauses function as a ‘telling-my-side’ device (cf. Pomernatz, 1980). That is, with nuntey-clauses, the speaker provides what s/he found out, saw, or heard from his/her side as circumstantial and evidential ground to be shared and invites the interlocutor to infer the speaker's intention (Park, 1996).