Collaborative Turn Completion in Korean Conversation

Abstract

Co-construction, or collaborative turn completion, is one of the attempts to explore interactional and sequential nature of conversation. This research explores the questions of how grammar is shaped by the interaction between speaker and hearer and what social actions are involved in the interaction in Korean. After examining types and frequency of co-construction in Korean conversational data, this research discusses roles and functions of the four most frequently used clausal connectives -nuntey, -ko, -myen, and -nikka as a way of characterizing co-construction in terms of semantic, pragmatic properties of the connectives. This inquiry also discusses contexts for the occurrence of co-construction, critically reviewing the claims that pragmatic factors coming from politeness or 'private territory of information', late projectability, and delay of the delivery of the final component are responsible for the production of co-construction. This research shows that co-construction is produced basically by next speaker's efforts to collaborate with current speaker based on shared or assumed knowledge. It shows that semantic, pragmatic properties and social actions are also responsible for the production of co-construction by exploring semantic, pragmatic properties of clausal connectives used in co-construction. In addition, this study explores what social actions are involved in the production of co-construction, focusing on the relationship between social actions and grammar in talk-in-interaction. Finally, this research shows the interactive nature of co-construction, suggesting the need to explore the relationship between interaction and grammar which is constantly shaped by the interaction between speaker and hearer.