An Analysis of Collaborative Completion in Korean Conversation

Abstract

From a conversation-analytic perspective, this paper examines various types of collaborative completion (or co-participant completion) in Korean conversation with reference to how they furnish the speakers with the resources for organizing social action. A co-participant's practice of adding continuations to the current speaker's turn in progress constitutes agrammatical practice by which the participants manage intersubjectivity and negotiate alignment. It provides the co-completor with the opportunity to participate in the current speaker's action, with his/her contribution serving as a basis on which the upshot of the current discourse is interactively upgraded. An important aspect of this interactional process is that the participants are collusively co-aligned or grouped against a third party who is thus constituted as the object of such social actions as co-blaming, co-criticizing, co-sympathizing, etc. Systematic attention is paid to the contextual features which enable a co-participant to complete the current speaker's turn in progress anticipatorily. Features of a less 'collaborative' type of co-completion, i.e., gisting, are briefly examined in terms of the ways in which a recipient's preemptive proposal of a candidate understanding is treated by the current speaker as being interruptive of hislher turn. Some of the implications of the findings are noted for their bearing upon various aspects of grammar-interaction interface