Reorganizing Participation Framework in Korean Conversation:

An Examination of the Sentence-Final Particle may

 

Mary Shin Kim

University of California, Los Angeles

This paper examines the interactive practices through which participants in Korean conversation reorganize the participation framework of an on-going talk and reshape each others’ unfolding talk and actions in everyday interactions. The focus of the study is on the Korean sentence-final particle may. May is a sentence-final particle which is attached at the end of an utterance, and it indicates that the information which precedes may is hearsay. Previous studies have viewed may as a source of evidentiality or as a speech act of a speaker eliciting confirmation on hearsay information from an addressee. However, an examination of Korean conversational data reveals that the use of may is a situated action of participants in particular instances of social interaction. The utilization of may is intricately tied to emerging talk, actions, and participation framework within interactions.

            The methodology used in this paper is conversation analysis (Sacks et al. 1974). The corpus for this study consists of seven hours of naturally-occurring conversations among native Korean speakers. The conversations are telephone conversations and video-recorded face-to-face conversations among close friends and family members.

May is employed in animating a non-present third party’s voice or animating a current speaker’s voice. The former use of may (animating a third party’s voice) displays how a speaker can reorganize the participation framework of the moment so that other participants will collaboratively participate in her talk and action. The speaker takes a stance through hearsay, and at the same time, the speaker elicits the addressee’s alignment to the speaker’s stance by speaking with a rising intonation (the English equivalent of ‘I hear, isn’t it true?’). The speaker elicits another participant’s alignment or co-participation by displaying the speaker’s uncertainty regarding the hearsay information she reports and simultaneously requesting confirmation of the information from the addressee who is assumed to have prior knowledge about it. This interactional function of may strategically utilizes the basic features of organization of conversations, such as turn-taking, preferred response, recipient-design, etc. May assists the speaker cope with various kinds of contingencies emerging in the course of an interaction (i.e. participants with different degrees of knowledge regarding what the speaker says, lack of other participants’ participation in the speaker’s talk and action, emergence of competing participation framework, etc.).

In addition, the use of may reveals the complexity of participation framework in interaction. The speaker’s stance is embedded under the stance of another speaker (a third party). As a consequence, the addressee is faced not only with the speaker’s stance, but with layered stances. In particular, when the addressee displays her disagreement, she not only needs to deal with the speaker’s stance alone, but the stance of a third party. The use of may in interaction displays how participants may hold multiple stances and how they may construct or readapt their talk and actions according to how they evaluate these multiple stances.

However, may not only functions to elicit another participant’s alignment to the speaker’s talk and action, but it also functions to undercut the alignment to the speaker’s talk and action. The latter use of may (animating a current speaker’s voice) displays how an addressee can disrupt, intrude, or oppose the current speaker’s talk or action in progress by using the speaker’s prior utterance as the basis of undermining the speaker’s talk or action. The addressee makes an action, such as making fun of, teasing, opposing, or undercutting the speaker’s stance or action, by pointing out that the speaker’s prior utterance/stance (the quoted talk) and the utterance/stance she is making in the current moment show a discrepancy (which is the equivalent of ‘You said that…’ in English). Such an action by the addressee is consequential in reshaping the current speaker’s unfolding talk and action. The speaker becomes situated in a position to readapt or mitigate her talk or action of the moment. In addition, such action of the addressee also invokes a participation framework where she invites other participants to join her action. May is often followed by laughter, and the laughter not only carries an affective effect on the addressee’s action of making fun of or undermining the speaker’s talk and action, but it also invites other participants to laugh and align with the addressee’s stance or action toward the speaker.

These interactional functions of may illustrate how participants of an interaction mobilize linguistic features, such as the sentence-final particle may, as an interactive resource to reorganize the participation framework of an on-going talk and reshape emerging talk and actions.