Topic Marker -Nun as an Exploratory Device

http://dx.doi.org/10.14353/sjk.2017.25.2.01

Topic Marker -Nun as an Exploratory Device : Shifting Domains for Stance Management in Pursuit of Intersubjectivity

Kim, Kyu-hyun (Kyung Hee University)

Abstract

Kim, Kyu-hyun. 2017. “Topic Marker -Nun as an Exploratory Device: Shifting Domains for Stance Management in Pursuit of Intersubjectivity“. The Sociolinguistic

Journal of Korea 25(2). **-**. Drawing upon the previous studies that identified the main discourse function of -nun as one of domain-setting and domain-shifting, this paper further investigates the interactional import of -nun used in assessment activities from the conversation-analytic and interactional linguistic perspectives. The analysis of naturally-occurring interactions suggests that the domain-shifting function of -nun is closely attuned to shifting, or even reversing, the valence of the speaker's evaluative stance in a way that invokes a hitherto unmentioned domain as grounds for soliciting the interlocutor's agreement/affiliation, expressing partial agreement, or marking oblique disagreement. Often formulated as an overstatement to be retracted and/or as a move to solicit the interlocutor's collaborative uptake through claiming knowledge (or lack thereof), the nun-utterance furnishes the speaker with a resource for obliquely implementing face-threatening actions, pursuing common ground, or upgrading affect. Embodying the speaker's ‘exploratory’ stance, the use of -nun conveys the sense that the speaker is going beyond the ‘appearance’ of the matter at hand (e.g., a sub-domain from which a new generic feature may be drawn and attributed to the referent). This practice, which is further supported by the nun-marked adverbials formulated as a ‘logical guidepost expression’, provides for the basis on which the speaker organizes assessment activities in an other-attentive way, e.g., through upgrading affiliation and downgrading disaffiliation vis-à-vis the interlocutor's prior action, while sustaining his/her baseline stance and epistemic independency.

Topic Marker -Nun as an Exploratory Device

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Keywords: the topic marker -nun, conversation analysis, assessment, domain shifting,

stance, intersubjectivity

1. Introduction In this paper, I explore the linguistic practice of using the linguistic signal -nun, known as the ‘topic marker’, in terms of how it is deployed for the interactional task of organizing action and managing stance in naturally-occurring interactions. -Nun is known to be associated, at least partly, with givenness or definiteness (cf. Chafe 1976, Clark & Haviland 1977) or with setting-up of a domain or thematic stage (cf. Maynard 1987), but its pragmatic potential has not been fully explicated (Lee & Lee 2003, Lee 2005). As the discussion in the subsequent sections will suggest, the analysis of its discourse function can be further enriched by examining the interactional practices and social actions for which it is deployed as an interactional resource. For instance, it has been noted that -nun used in assessment activities tends to be embedded in the context where the participants negotiate their stances vis-à-vis each other in the direction of enhancing affiliation and minimizing disaffiliation, e.g., by way of promoting solidarity and avoiding confrontation (Kim 2016). An important point to be noted, in this respect, is that the interactional meaning of -nun can be grasped in the most fruitful way by closely examining both the context-shaping and context-renewing aspects of its sequential deployment (Heritage 1984). This line of analysis is also consonant with the semiotic approach of linguistic anthropology that takes the meaning of a linguistic signal as one that includes how its use is ‘enchronically’ taken up in the next turn as well as occasioned

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The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea Vol. 25 No. 2

by the prior context (Enfield 2013). Pursuing the line of an interactional analysis as such, this paper, from the perspectives of conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974, Sacks 1992) and interactional linguistics (Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2001), aims to further investigate the interactional function of -nun used in ordinary conversatio n1) by examining how it is deployed as a resource for organizing actions through operating on the domain that its use invokes and indexes over the course of dealing with prior actions and projecting subsequent actions. Focus is given to the analysis of how the use of -nun is deployed in the service of shifting the referential or expressive domain from which the relevance of the current or projected action is to be drawn as the speaker responds to the prior action or organizes the subsequent one. In the context of responding to a prior action, one of the issues that needs to be addressed is how -nun is methodically used as part of a practice geared to avoiding confrontation with the other speaker by way of invoking a different domain of activities in which the relevance of the prior action is made to disappear or weakened. In the context of organizing the subsequent action, the speaker orients towards proposing terms on which intersubjective understanding and stance/action alignment can be promoted (cf. Du Bois 2007, Stivers 2008). The ‘indirectly’ way in which many of the nun-marked actions are implemented (cf. Walker, Drew, & Local 2011) is observed in the most acute form in the context where the participants orient to remedying, or preempting, stance/action disalignment over the course of constructing a path towards the state of intersubjectivity (Kim 2016). In this respect, the nun-mediated domain-shifting 1) The data used in this paper include ordinary face-to-face conversations and a set of overheard utterances and conversational segments.


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practice will be further elaborated in this paper as members' ‘other-attentive’ practice of claiming knowledge (or lack thereof), which is geared to pursuing common ground. The domain being newly proposed through the nun-utterance furnishes the speaker with a resource for organizing actions obliquely as he/she goes about mitigating or downgrading stance differences with the interlocutor while not revoking his/her baseline stance and sustaining his/her epistemic independency.

2. Domain Shifting as a Practice 2.1. Modulating stance Viewed from an interactional perspective, various functions of nun can be recast as actions grounded in the practice of the domain-shifting (or domain-expanding) observed in the way assessment activities are organized, e.g., upgraded, downgraded, polarity/valence-shifted, temporally or locationally re-situated, and so forth. As noted in Kim (2016), the nun-marked assessment is often formulated in such a way that the speaker orients towards avoiding or minimizing stance differences. Geared towards variously modulating stance in assessment activities, the use of the nun-assessment invokes a domain of expressivity in such a way that the speaker brings up a category feature whose evaluative valence works to expand the domain than the one that has been entertained in the prior assessment activities, often with the consequence that the speaker backs down from his/her prior action. Consider Extract (1), where the son and his mother are assessing the shirt that he is wearing. At line 1,

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the son makes a self-complimenting assessment of the shirt he is wearing, saying that it makes him look ‘skinny’. With no uptake forthcoming from the mom, he backs down at line 3, saying that at least it does not make him look fat. Note that this downgraded assessment is marked by -nun:

(1) [Overheard conversation: Mom and Son] → 1 Son:

i-ke

ip-umyen

mallapoye.

this-thing put:on-COND skinny:looking:IE

이거 입으면 말라보여. ‘If I put on this (shirt), I look skinny.’ 2 → 3 Son:

(.)

ccyepoi-ci-n

anh-a.

fat:looking-COMP-TOP NEG-IE

쪄 보이진 않아. ‘I don't look fat-nun, at least. (Literal: Looking-fat-nun isn't the case.)’ 4 Mom:

tel ccyepoin-tako

hayya-ci.

less fat:looking-QUOT do:NECESS-COMM

덜 쪄 보인다고 해야지. ‘It's more like you look less fat (Literal: Less fat-looking, you should say.)’

In backing down, the son operates across the category-set ‘skinny/fat’, as manifested by the nun-marked downgrade (‘skinny-looking’ → ‘not fat-looking-nun’). The mom, while accepting the newly proposed domain ‘being fat-looking’ as a relevant category-feature attributable to the referent, displays


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a disagreeing stance by replacing it with the more explicitly graded expression ‘less fat-looking’ (cf. Sapir 1944). The configuration of this assessment sequence can be represented in the following manner, in terms of the domain of expressivity being invoked and progressively shifted:

Line 1

Son:

Line 2

‘Skinny-looking’ No uptake from Mom

⇒ Projects disagreement

Line 3

Son:

‘Not fat-looking-nun’

⇒ Back-down

Line 4

Mom:

‘Less fat-looking’

⇒ Mitigated disagreement

The nun-speaker backs down from his claim that he looks skinny in the shirt he is wearing in the face of his mom's projected disagreement, with -nun marking the domain shift in assessment towards a downgrade (‘skinny’ to ‘not fat’). A single category incumbent (‘shirt’) is assessed in terms of its relationship to the bearer (‘the son’) who is constituted as the assessable in terms of whether the bearer in the shirt looks skinny, not fat, or less fat. This set of features, bound to the category incumbent ‘the bearer of the shirt’, is organized as a bundle of scalar items (Bilmes 2010). Their relative differences have distinct interactional consequences for implicating the son as the ‘butt’ of the mom's assessment having ‘teasing’ import, presumably in a way that enhances intimacy between the mom and the son. In a similar vein, consider Extract (2), where S is making a comment about the hair style of her sister-in-law who had her hair cut short. In the preceding context, S, noticing her sister-in-law's new short-hair style, insinuated that she liked her old hair style better, thereby implicitly soliciting an account for why she had chosen the short-hair style. In response to the latter's account

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that she had her hair cut because the weather was too warm, S makes a

nun-marked assessment at line 1, with which she makes a positive assessment in the form of a construction that includes the nominalizer -ki and the general verb -ha ‘do’, where the use of -nun is obligatory. With the nun-utterance formulated as the ki-construction as such, which inherently indexes the speaker's backing-down stance, S moves away from her previously negative stance displayed towards her sister-in-law's new hairstyle, which is now being evaluated positively:

(2) [Overheard Conversation: At a Chinese Restaurant] 1

S:

ccalpun meli-ka ewulli-ki-n

enni-ka

hay

sister-NOM short hair-NOM match-NOML-TOP do:IE

언니가 짧은 머리가 어울리긴 해. ‘You do look good-nun with short hair. (lit.: Short hair ‘matches well-nun’ with you.)’ ((a couple of lines omitted)) 4

kuntey yeppu-key DM

ccalu-nketkat-ci-nun anh-a.

pretty-MANN cut-MOD-CONN-TOP NEG-IE

근데 예쁘게 자른 것 같지는 않아. ‘But it does not look like cutting was done properly-nun (=in a pretty way-nun).’

After an intervening talk not represented in the extract, S, at line 4, makes another nun-marked assessment, whose valence shifts back to negative; she shifts the valence of her assessment from being positive (line 1) to negative (line 4). Note that S's resumption of her negative assessment is mitigated, with the


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domain marked with -nun indexing a domain of expressivity pertaining to an alternative (and better) state of affairs in which the new hair style comes out in a ‘pretty’ way. The shift in evaluative valence made through this domain-shift takes the form of what Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (2005) call ‘concessive repair’, in which the domain marked with -nun is formulated as an overstatement, which is to be retracted subsequently through denial.2)

Preceding context S: ‘Old hair style was better.’ (Negative) Line 1

S: ‘Short hair becomes-nun you.’ ⇒ Back-down (Positive)

Line 4

S: ‘Not properly cut though-nun’ ⇒ Back-down (Negative)

The shift in S's stance observed in this sequence pivots around the shifting of the domain marked by -nun. At line 1, the nun-marked domain pertains to the target person's ‘generic’ trait of looking good in short hair,3) which is in the service of S's act of backing down from her previous negative assessment of the target's short hair made in the preceding context. The stance shift in reversing the valence of evaluation4) thus correlates with a domain shift from the description of the target's appearance produced earlier to the one that pertains 2) Also see the son's backing-down at line 3 in Extract (1), which is likewise grounded in his overstatement (‘He looks fat’) being subsequently negated. 3) Note that S’s nun-utterance marks her backing-down from her negative stance that was conveyed by her noticing of her sister-in-law’s new hair style, which was not produced in the form of a compliment but as an account-solicitation. In this sense, the domain of the target person’s generic trait (i.e. ‘looking good in short hair’) can be analyzed as having been invoked as pro forma grounds for enhancing affiliation with the interlocutor in the context of managing a conflictual stance. 4) In this paper, I am using the terms ‘assessment’ and ‘evaluation’ interchangeably, even though the latter is considered a broader notion that is used to make reference to and describe how evaluation permeates the discourse at different levels of organization and with varying degrees of explicitness (Labov 1972, Thompson & Hunston 2000).

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to her ‘generic’ appearance. At line 4, S shifts back to the negative assessment. Note here that she invokes another domain pertaining to the skills of the hairdresser (‘But it does not look like cutting was done properly-nun’). At both line 1 and line 4, the domain shift warrants S's disjunctive stance shift. The shifted domain marked by -nun furnishes the speaker with grounds for implementing face-sensitive task of making an assessment of the interlocutor's new hair style in a mitigated way, i.e. by invoking a ‘new’ domain in relation to which she can formulate her assessment as a ‘generalized’ comment vis-à-vis her negative assessment displayed in the preceding context (line 1), and resumes her earlier line of negative assessment by shifting the domain to the one that makes reference to skills of the hairdresser (line 4).5)

2.2. Countering obliquely The preceding discussion suggests that the nun-marked assessment furnishes the speaker with a resource for modulating stance by way of invoking an expressive domain which is semantically opposite to, or wider in scope than, the one that has been invoked in the preceding context. As shown in Extracts (1) and (2), this domain-shifting feature of nun allows the evaluation to serve the interactional motivation geared to dealing with the prior action in an oblique way. Often formulated as an overstatement (Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson 2005),

5) These observations are in line with the view that treats language as a semiotic system. As Enfield (2013: 46) notes, in the context of language as a relevant semiotic system with its full set of expressive options, a likely interpretation of an assessment expression good is ‘not excellent’. He observes that ‘since there are many stronger ways to appraise something positively, to say good implies that it was not more than good; it was not fantastic, not excellent, and not brilliant.’


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the nun-marked utterance invokes a hither-to-not-invoked expressive or descriptive domain with reference to which the speaker may counter the prior action. This feature of the nun-utterance is observed saliently when it is used to express partial disagreement turn-initially. In this context, its import as an overstatement is found in the way it invokes a domain indexing a finer degree of granularity (Schegloff 2000) which the prior action it is responding to is not designed to deal with. The nun-marked assessment entails a retraction, with the descriptive domain it marks having been ostensibly brought up to be negated. This practice eventuates a situation in which the nun-speaker, while not accepting, or not directly countering, the interlocutor's contribution made in the preceding context, still can claim his/her own disagreeing stance. Consider Extract (3), a conversation between graduate students studying linguistics at a university in the U.S.:

(3) [Lunch Talk] 1

H:

kim kyoswunim paper-ey

com

nawaiss-nuntey.

Kim professor paper-LOC a little come:out:CONN-CIRCUM

김 교수님 페이퍼에 좀 나와 있는데. ‘(That issue) is addressed in Prof. Kim's paper.’ → 2

S:

caseyhi-nun, in detail-TOP

자세히는. ‘Not in detail, though.’

In the preceding context, S asked H a question about Korean linguistics, and at line 1, H mentions a reference in which she can find some relevant information.

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At line 2, S responds with a nun-marked adverb (caseyhi-nun ‘in detail-nun’), with which she invokes an expressive domain (‘the degree of being detailed’) in relation to which her negative assessment is mitigated. S's nun-marked manner adverb constitutes an overstatement in the sense that it invokes a domain that H's prior utterance was not focally designed to address. Note that its retraction is projected even without needing to be explicitly negated, thereby enabling S to refute H's proposal without directly countering it. The feature of -nun formulating a newly-invoked domain in which a prior action or proposition is recast for a hither-to-unnoticed action-implication is observed in the context where the speaker responds obliquely to the other speaker's assertion. With a nun-marked adverb produced as a response, the speaker displays a stance that does not fully endorses the prior point by way of ‘delimiting’ the scope to which his ostensive agreement is to be applied (Yang 1973, Lee 2005). Consider Extract (4), where the son produces an increment in Korean, which is tagged onto his father's sentence produced in English. In this context, the father's comment at line 1 is made about the cartoon character Calvin in

Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, where he notes his naïveté. In response, the son produces a nun-marked phrase, which is incrementally tagged onto the father's assessment:

(4) [Overheard Conversation] 1 → 2

Father:

He may be naive. ((Said in English))

Son:

etten myen-eyse-nun. some aspects-LOC-TOP

어떤 면에서는. ‘In some respects.’


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With his nun-marked phrase being retroactively connected to his father's assessment, the son, while basically aligning with his father, displays that he is only in partial agreement with him. Its mitigating effect can be felt in the way the son's not-fully-aligning stance is displayed obliquely through invoking some unspecified descriptive domain (‘in some respects’), marked with -nun, as the one that delimits the scope of his assessment vis-à-vis the father's first assessment. In the next section, I move on to the case in which -nun marks a referent indexical of a domain whose category features are brought up in relation to the prior mention of the same referent or a ‘comparable’ referent sharing the same category-membership characteristics (Sacks 1972). It will be shown that the preceding observations about how nun-marked expressive domains are invoked as an interactional resource for stance and action management are also relevant to the case in which -nun indexes a referential domain.

3. Category Work as Domain-Shifting Practice The domain-shifting practice involving nun is frequently observed in the context where the participants engage in assessment activities of various types focusing on a referent constituted as the target of assessment. The interactional import of the nun-marked utterance in such a case tends to piggyback upon the preceding sequence by way of being grounded in the context as ‘another incumbent’ of the same category invoked in the preceding context. For instance, -nun may be used to mark the referent ‘my grandma’ in initiating a telling about her, after another referent who shares the same membership, e.g., ‘grandpa’

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was mentioned in the interlocutor's telling in the preceding context, with those referents being inferentially connected as the co-incumbents of the membership category ‘grandparents’ (Kim 2000, 2014). Extract (5) is a case in point. At line 1, H uses -nun for mentioning her own class (cehi pan-un-yo ‘(As for) my class-nun’) after other participants talked about how they are managing their classes. The participants in this conversation are Korean TA's teaching Korean as a foreign language at a US college:

(5) [TA Meeting] → 1

H:

2

ceki uh-

cehi pan-un-yo

that

our class-TOP-POL gradually

cwul-eyo

haksayng swu-ka-yo.

cem cem

decrease-IE student number-NOM-POL

저기 어- 저희 반은요 점점 줄어요 학생수가요. ‘Well, (as for) my class-nun, it's decreasing, the number of students.’ 3

K:

ai

cohkeyss-ta.

DM good-DECL

아이 좋겠다. ‘You should be feeling good.’ 4

J:

myet-myeng-i-eyo? how:many-CL-COP-IE:POL

몇 명이예요? ‘How many do you have?’

Note that H's nun-marked noun phrase is mentioned by way of being sequentially ‘licensed’ by the membership category invoked in the preceding


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context, where the other participants talked about what is happening in each of their own classes several weeks into the semester. As an incumbent of the category ‘class’ invoked earlier, the nun-marked referent ‘my class’ furnishes the speaker with the means of continuing the sequence of self-assessment vis-à-vis the other TA's. H's self-assessment is formulated in the form of a self-degradation, as shown at lines 1 and 2, which is oriented to as such by the other participants, K and J, who respond with an empathic comment (line 3) and an other-attentive inquiry (line 4) respectively. Extract (5) illustrates a context where the speaker invokes a member of the same category (‘class’) that has been invoked in the prior context, thereby using the category as a pivot on which to peg her side of telling by way of piggybacking it on the other speaker's telling. With the turn-initially produced nun-marked referent, H moves the talk into her own domain by initiating ‘my-side-telling’ (Pomerantz 1980) in response to the others' ‘their-side-telling’. Situating her own telling at the same footing as the others', H initiates her telling in a way that is reminiscent of the way a second story is initiated as a collaborative uptake of the first story, with the other TA's prior telling being oriented to by H as the ‘first story’ to actively collaborate with (Sacks 1992). These observations suggest that the use of -nun here can be analyzed as marking a referent that indexes a category-membership domain shared by the previously-mentioned referents. Furthermore, as will be shown in a more salient form in some of the following extracts, we find the sense that H, with her

nun-marked referent, marks her telling as an interactional move indexing her orientation toward making a contribution to the current sequence of talk by way of going ‘deeper’ into explicating the given target domain (‘class’) (see Section V).

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Extract (6) is a case in which we can see how the nun-marked domain-shifting practice is implemented in the form of a category-managing practice, which is employed in the service of modulating the speaker's displayed evaluative stance. In the preceding context, the speaker described the wedding ceremony she went to, praising the bride for her beautiful looks. As the talk moved to the topic of the age of the bride, who was in her thirties, the speaker downgrades her assessment, marked by -nun, saying that as far as her face was concerned, she looked quite old. Note that, with her negative assessment marked with -nun, S narrows down the target of her assessment from the bride's general appearance to her face:

(6) [Overheard utterance: Wedding ceremony talk] (In the preceding context, S complimented the bride, saying that she looked beautiful at the wedding ceremony.) S:

elkwul-un manhi nulk-ess-te-la face-TOP a:lot

get:old-PST-RETROS-IE

얼굴은 많이 늙었더라 ‘Her face-nun looked quite old though.’

Note that the narrowing-down of the domain to the one that specifically concerns the face of the bride warrants the reversal of valence in the speaker's assessment from the positive (‘She was beautiful’) to the negative (‘her face looked quite old’). The nun-mediated domain-narrowing practice observed in this process embodies the speaker's stance that the initial assessment she made positively about the bride's general appearance can be further elaborated and even revised substantially through the invocation of a sub-domain (e.g., face).


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Note, in this respect, that S's assessment of a more specified domain － the face of the bride － does not necessarily obviate her previous positive assessment made of the bride's general appearance, which has the character of small talk in which brides are normatively praised for their beauty. Also note in this respect that the ‘face’ seems to lend itself more easily to an evaluation of whether one looks more ‘young’ or ‘old’, without affecting the key aspects of the overall assessment of the appearance (cf. Bilmes 2010). The shift in valence in S's evaluative statement, on the basis of which she engages in making a negative assessment not totally congruent with her previous assessment, enacts the context in which the speaker and the interlocutors can opt to pursue that line of negative evaluation in a less face-impinging and more morally-defendable fashion, because, once a shifted domain is marked with -nun, the speaker (and the interlocutor) has the option of either sustaining the line of negative assessment through further elaboration, or returning to the previous line of positive assessment by way of resuming the generalized assessment pertaining to the bride's overall appearance. In this sense, we can say that the use of -nun contributes to ‘expanding’ the referential and expressive domain in relation to which the referent can be further assessed subsequently in terms of additional category membership features. Extract (7) is a case in which the reversal of evaluative stance is facilitated through a category work that draws upon invoking a temporal domain. The

nun-utterance here is produced in the context where S is eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant with her family and relatives. In the preceding context, S, as the one who recommended this particular Chinese restaurant as a place known for serving a delicious fried seafood dish. After making a strongly positive assessment of the dish in the preceding context, she backs down with a

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nun-marked assessment at line 1. Note that -nun marks a newly introduced referent indexing a temporal domain (onul-un ‘today-nun’), conveying the sense that her back-down is only temporary, with her less positive assessment being categorially bound to the domain ‘today’:

(7) [Overheard utterance: At a Chinese Restaurant] 1

S:

onul-un

com

manhi thwuikyess-ta

today-TOP a:little a:lot

fry-PST-DECL

오늘은 좀 많이 튀겼다. ‘Today-nun it's a little too overdone.’

As a conjunct, onul ‘today’ marked by -nun is a temporal device that is inherently susceptible to being graded (e.g., compared with ‘yesterday’, ‘last week’, etc.) (cf. Sapir 1944) by way of indexing a domain to which the speaker may shift as a way of describing a notable, exceptional, or otherwise deviant practice vis-à-vis some other temporarily non-specified domain normatively associated with her positive assessment. As in Extract (2), the domain-shifting allows the speaker to engage in an assessment that might be viewed as being ostensibly incongruent with her prior one; in this case, S is assessing the particular Chinese dish negatively on the basis of the temporal ground, which she otherwise would strongly recommend. This observation suggests that one of the interactional imports of using -nun is to be found in the way it is used to shift or even reverse the valence of the assessment without obviating the prior stance that the speaker has displayed or asserted in the preceding context; the nun-utterance enables the speaker to modulate his/her stance while sustaining his/her baseline stance.


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The feature of -nun as the marker referencing or indexing a domain renders it a useful resource that can be deployed along with other grammatical practices specialized for invoking the speaker's territorial domain of knowledge or experience. For instance, -nun is frequently used in the nuntey-clause6) that provides the ‘background’ formulated as a normative basis for bringing up a ‘notable’ feature of the assessable. Consider (8), which is drawn from a TV documentary in which octopus-catching women are being interviewed. In this utterance, the speaker, an octopus catcher herself, is making a comment about her fellow female worker:

(8) [TV Documentary on Octopus-Catchers] Octopus catcher:

ton-ul

mot pele-yo.

nakci-nun

manhi

money-AC not:able make-POL octopus-TOP a:lot

cap-nuntey

ton-ul

mot pel-eyo.

catch-CIRCUM money-ACC not:able make:POL

돈을 못 벌어요. 낙지는 많이 잡는데 돈을 못 벌어요. ‘She is not making (good) money. Even though she is catching octopuses-nun a lot -nuntey, she is not making (good) money.’

The octopus catcher's first turn-constructional unit (TCU) is formulated as a negative assessment of her fellow worker (ton-ul mot pele-yo ‘She is not making (good) money’), which may be taken as implying that she is a poor octopus 6) -Nuntey is a clausal connective (circumstantial) that marks an often contrastively-pitched clausal relationship with its main clause, conveying the sense of contrast, opposition, or counter-expectation (Lee 1980, Lee 1999). The nuntey-clause is often formulated as ‘my-side-telling’ (Park 1999), grounded in the terms of the speaker’s territorial knowledge or experience (cf. Kim & Suh 2015).

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catcher. It is notable, in this respect, that the speaker subsequently produces a nun-utterance as a positive assessment praising the target person's octopus-catching skills (‘she is catching octopuses-nun a lot -nuntey’). The reversal of evaluative judgment is brought up as the background information marked by the circumstantial -nuntey. Formulated with -nuntey, the

nun-utterance invokes the target person's good octopus-catching skills as grounded in her territorial knowledge (as a fellow octopus-catcher) (Park 1999, Kim & Suh 2015). As noted above, without the nuntey-marked preface involving -nun, the hearer (in this case the TV viewing audience) would be likely to be led to infer that the target person does not make good money because she is not good at her job of catching octopuses. In this respect, the nuntey-clause containing the

nun-marked referent, as a background statement prefatory to the speaker's negative assessment being recycled form her first one, serves to forestall the negative inference (regarding the target person's octopus-catching skills) entailed from the prior negative assessment (of the target person's money making abilities). With the nun-utterance formulated as part of the nuntey-clause, the speaker's negative assessment is situated on firmer empirical ground by way of inferentially attributing the target person's non-affluent state of affairs to other causes than her octopus-catching skills. These observations suggest that the use of nun contributes to invoking a specific domain (pertaining to octopuses or octopus-catching skills as a constitutive feature of their profession as well as its lucrativeness) in relation to which the target person can be ‘positively’ assessed (i.e. in terms of her octopus-catching skills), which is geared to forestalling or correcting the negative inference that may entail from the prior negative assessment about her not making good money.


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We find, in this respect, the sense that the nun-mediated practice, as a domain-shifting or expanding practice, embodies the speaker's orientation towards

pursuing common ground and accomplishing intersubjective

understanding. Furthermore, as I will discuss more in detail in the next section, -nun's use embodies the speaker's orientation towards making an exploratory move to ‘unpackage’ some hither-to-not-revealed aspect/feature of the invoked domain (cf. Jefferson 1985) as a generic trait to be attributed to the nun-marked referent.

4. Claim of Knowledge and Pursuit of Common Ground As suggested in Extract (8) and many other extracts examined above, the use of -nun often embodies the speaker's orientation towards remedying the potential problem of failure in intersubjective understanding. For instance, the use of -nun is associated with the sequential context where the participants are visibly oriented towards dealing with some aspect of the current interaction that is reflexively shown to be in need of some ‘remedial effort’ geared to accomplishing intersubjectivity and enhancing solidarity. This contextual feature associated with -nun may be observed in the way the speaker claims knowledge as a way of pursuing common grounds (Jucker & Smith 1996) on the basis of which he/she can manage intersubjective understandings. Consider Extract (9):

(9) (S & H) 22 H:

… (1.8) mola

na.

not:know:IE I

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23

camsi-- camsil-kwucang-un

an kapawase

Jamsi-- Jamsil-stadium-TOP no go:CONNsee:CONN → 24

cal molu-keyss-nuntey, well not:know-MOD-CIRCUM

몰라 나 잠실- 잠실구장은 안 가:봐서 잘 모르겠는데. ‘I don't know. I don't know because I haven't been to Jamsil Stadium-nun.’ ((Two lines omitted)) 27 H:

yeysnal sewul-wuntongcan[-man ka old:days Seoul-stadium-only

28

po-kwuse

go:CONN

incey,

see-CONN now

옛날 서울운동장만 가 보구서 인제, ‘I have only been to Seoul Stadium in the old days, and then,’ [Sewul-wundongcang-un

→ 29 S:

Seoul-stadium-TOP 30

kapwass-cyo. go:CONN:see:PST-COMM:POL

서울운동장은 가봤죠. ‘Seoul Stadium-nun, I've been (there).’

In the preceding context, H described the grandiose style of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles to his friend S, who responded by saying that he had not been there. As a reciprocating move, S brought up Jamsil Stadium in Seoul, whose grandiose style was proposed to be comparable to that of Dodger Stadium. At lines 22-24, H responds by saying that he does not know anything about


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Jamsil Stadium because he has never been there. Over the course of disclaiming knowledge about Jamsil Stadium, H continues his account at line 27 and 28, where he says that he had been to Seoul Stadium though, which was the only Stadium in Seoul before Jamsil Stadium was constructed later.7) H's turn is then interrupted by S, who repeats ‘Seoul Stadium’, marked with -nun, in confirming his shared knowledge about it (‘Seoul Stadium-nun, I've been (there)’). That he interrupts H's turn in progress so deep in the latter's turn space suggests that S is oriented to showing to H as early as possible that they have finally found a domain about which they can resume assessment activities together on the bassis of shared knowledge, after failing to do so earlier on two previous occasions with regard to Dodger Stadium and Jamsil Stadium. Overall, we find that H uses -nun in declaiming knowledge about Jamsil Stadium, and S uses nun in claiming knowledge about Seoul Stadium, and this suggests that the use of nun in this context embodies the participants' orientation towards locating shared grounds of knowledge with a view to saving the topic being fizzled out, and developing it further in pursuit of intersubjectivity. The use of -nun for locating a shared domain in pursuit of intersubjective understanding seems to be a practice which is observed widely across different contexts. Actually, a strikingly similar practice is observed in English conversation where speakers manage each other's epistemic rights over the course of an assesment sequence. For instance, consider Extract (10), which was drawn from a conversation between Jenny and Vera where they are talking about Vera's two grandchild, analyzed in Raymond & Heritage (2006):

7) H had immigrated to the United States before Jamsil Stadium was constructed, which accounts for why he had only been to Seoul Stadium, which used to be the only stadium in Seoul until mid-1980s.

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(10) [Rahman: 14, from Raymond & Heritage (2006)] (Jenny and Vera are talking about Vera's grandchildren, Paul and James.) 27 Jen: Yeh James's a little devil ihhh heh heh [.huh 28 Ver:

[That-

29 Jen: .hh[h He:30 Ver:

[James is a little bugger [isn'e.

31 Jen:

[Yeh- Yeah=

32 Jen: =[(he eats) ev'rythi]ing. → 33 Ver: =[Mindju 'eez good] Jenny, 'e was → 34

mischeevious but w- 'e wz good.

→ 35 Jen: Oo 'e wz beautiful here [wuz n't ee.= 36 Ver:

[ Yes

37 Jen: ='E wz very well beha:ved.

At line 27, Jenny makes a ‘loaded’ assessment about James, one of Vera's grandchildren, describing him in a mildly negative way as a ‘little devil’, which is reciprocated by Vera's negative assessment of her grandchild's generic trait at line 30 (‘James is a little bugger, isn't he’). This ostensibly prompts Jenny to engage in a more focused and more explicitly negative assessment at line 32 (‘He eats everything’). In overlap with this utterance, Vera disjunctively shifts to a positive assessment of James at lines 33-34, prefaced by a sort of rebuking directive and followed by a contrastive remark through which James's generally ‘good’ nature is juxtaposed with his temporary exhibition of ‘mischievous’ behavior (‘Mind you, he is good, Jenny. He was mischievous but he was good’).8) 8) The fact that Vera addresses Jenny with the address term ‘Jenny’ further strengthens the sense that she is rebuking Jenny for her negative assessment of James.


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As Raymond & Heritage (2006: 698) observe:

“[In line 33] By prefacing her assessment with mind you, Vera initiates a reversal of terms in which James is to be assessed from the general and negative evaluations (e.g., as in little devil and little bugger in lines 27 and 30) to a particularized and positive evaluation based on her immediate experience of his behavior.”

Note that Vera's disjunctive reversal of terms in which James is to be assessed puts Jenny in a dilemma. If she agrees with Vera's new assessment, she would give the impression that she is just going along with Vera's judgment by revoking her own (negative) stance displayed thus far. If she disagrees with Vera, she would risk confronting Vera, the party who is entitled to claim epistemic authority (i.e. as the grandmother of James) (Heritage & Raymond 2005). Note how Jenny manages this dilemma at line 35, which is done in a highly daft way (‘Oh he was beautiful here wasn't he’). In this utterance, she brings up her own house, being indexically referred to by ‘here’, as a place where James was observed to be ‘beautiful’. In relation to the claim that I am making in this paper with respect to the domain-shifting function of -nun, we find that Jenny is engaging in a highly subtle form of domain-shifting; with ‘here;, Jenny evokes the domain ‘her own house’ as an independent basis (for which she can claim epistemic authority as the host) for her reversed evaluative position about James, thereby successfully evading the risky options noted above; she manages to indicate that her stance shift is not ‘merely responsive’ to Vera's (Heritage & Raymond 2005: 31), and she avoids contesting the assessment made by epistemically stronger Vera as grandmother of James. Indeed, translation of Jenny's remark at line 35 into Korean would include -nun marking ‘here’ (yekise-nun

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‘here-nun’). As her house (i.e. ‘here’) has been invoked as new domain, locationally and temporally bounded within her lifeworld domain in which the James's behavior can be assessed in a diametrically opposite way, Jenny can continue her line of assessment of James with reversed evaluative valence, as shown in her turn at line 11 (‘He was very well behaved’).9) This cross-linguistic observation, though brief and preliminary, suggests that the domain-shifting mediated by -nun could indeed be treated as a type of recurrently observed and systematically patterned ‘practice’; it seems to be employed in the sequential context where the speaker chooses a territorial domain where he/she can claim epistemic rights over the course of navigating across a whole array of different ones with a view to managing face, epistemic rights, and intersubjectivity. Overall, the preceding observations suggest that the situated use of -nun is geared to managing actions ‘accountably’ in a way that the speaker backs down in order to mitigate disagreement, shifts the valence of the assessment (e.g., from the positive to the negative), obliquely countering the other's disagreement without disputing it, sequentially piggybacking the current talk on the previously invoked category as a resource for organizing ‘my-side-telling’, forestalling a negative inference while sustaining the key of the current assessment activities, or claiming knowledge (or lack thereof) about a candidate domain, ostensibly in pursuit of common ground and intersubjectivity. In all these cases, the backing-down or mitigating actions are accomplished through the practice of shifting or expanding the domain, indexed by the nun-utterance, in relation to which the speaker goes about shifting his/her stance disjunctively but accountably, while 9) For a fuller explication of this extract, see Raymond & Heritage (2006) and Heritage & Raymond (2005).


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more or less sustaining the baseline stance that he/she has been displaying in the prior context of talk.

5. Domain Elaboration as Re-Grading -Nun may be used to mark the same referent that has been mentioned in the prior context. In such a context, the reiterated nun-marked referent is often found in the context where the speaker orients to ‘re-grading’ (e.g., upgrading or downgrading) the level of affect (Bilmes 2010), embodying the speaker's orientation towards leveling up affiliation with the interlocutor or re-framing the key of the first assessment made by the other speaker through invoking his/her own epistemic authority (Heritage & Raymond 2005, Lee 2005). For instance, in Extract (11) below, S, at line 7, interrupts H's positive assessment in progress (lines 5-6) and produces the second assessment, marked by -nun; both assessments target the same referent － the quantity of the breakfast combo plate that S is eating － whose bountifulness is being evaluated in terms of the domain ‘the number of people who can finish that combo plate’ (‘for two people to eat’). This conversation takes place in the context where H is assessing the breakfast combo plate S is sharing with her husband at a campus cafeteria:

(11) [North Campus Talk: Breakfast] (H is assessing the breakfast combo plate S is sharing with her husband.) 5

H:

ah

kulemyen twul-i

DM then 6

54

mek-ki-ey

two-NOM eat-NOML-LOC

cham [coh -ney::


very good-FR

아 그러면 둘이 먹기에 참 좋네:: ‘Wow then it's very good for two people to share.’ → 7

S:

[twul-i

mek-ki-ey-nun

two-NOM eat-NOML-LOC-TOP 8

kwaynchanh-ayo. not:bad-IE:POL

둘이 먹기에는 괜찮아요. ‘It's not bad for two people to share-nun.’

Note that S's nun-marked assessment is a downgrade (‘It's not bad ...’) vis-à-vis H's first assessment (‘It's very good ...’),10) with which she claims her epistemic authority as the one who is actually sharing the food with her husband. Though formulated as a mitigated agreement, it works to confirm H's evaluative stance conveyed in the first assessment, thereby putting it on firmer solid empirical grounds11) on which they can claim shared knowledge and aligned stance on the bountifulness of the breakfast combo plate. The nun-marked second assessment may be produced as an upgrade, e.g., as a way of intensifying affect and soliciting reciprocally upgraded affiliation

10) S’s production of her second assessment as a downgrade would be attributed to its status as a compliment response, in which S orients to H’s first assessment as a compliment and attempts to avoid self-praise (Pomerantz 1978). 11) Note that, even though H's first assessment conveys her intense affect through the use of the descriptor ‘good’ along with the intensifier ‘very’, an extreme case formulation that upgrades the affect (Pomerantz 1980), its positive import derives from its formulation as a conventionally polite form of ‘other-praise’, based solely on perceptions and possibly motivated as a social etiquette expressed to mitigate the potentially problematic, deviant, or at least ‘noticeable’ nature of the current situation where her friend, S, is sharing a single dish with her husband.


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from the interlocutor in the context where stance alignment between the speakers has already been established (Kim 2016). This tendency is also observed when the speaker finds the interlocutor not being collaborative with his/her prior telling. Consider Extract (12). At lines 1-6, H told N a story of what had happened to a son of their mutual friend, saying that the child bumped into a steel chair while chasing pigeons and hurt his head badly. N, however, responds by saying that getting hurt is part of growing up, something every child experiences (lines 8-9), thereby insinuating that the story is not tellable (‘All children are like that. They're all getting hurt somehow as they grow up.’).12) The subtly non-collaborative nature of N's response, preceded by a gap projecting a dispreferred response (line 7), can be seen from his use of the extreme case formulation ta ‘all’ (Pomerantz 1986, Edwards 2000), with which he challenges the legitimacy of H's stance displayed towards this particular child. In response, H continues his telling at lines 11-12 by elaborating on the child's running style. Here the child, referred to by the quasi-pronoun kay ‘that kid’ (Oh 2007), is marked with-nun. Preceded by a 2-second-long gap (line 10) and prefaced by the discourse marker kuntey ‘but’, H's nun-utterance embodies his stance counteracting N's paternalistic, nonchalant uptake of his report:

(12) [N & H] 1

H:

ahyu ku-ttay

ima kkay-ci-n-ke

EXCL that-time brow break-INCHOA-ATTR-NOML 2

sayngkakha-myen, think-COND

12) This not-so-collaborative uptake of H’s story by N may be attributed to the fact that N has also heard about the accident, as shown at line 3.

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‘God, if I think about that accident when the kid hurt his head,’ 3

N:

hakkyo ka-se

kulay-ss-tamyense-yo?

school go-CONN do:like:that-PST-QUOT-POL ‘I heard it happened on campus.’ 4

H:

ung. ku soy uyca

iss-cianh-a,=

yes that steel chair exist-COMM-IE ‘Yes. You know those steel chairs,’ 5

N:

=yey. yes ‘Yes.’

6

H:

keki khone-eyta pak-ass-e

khwak kunyang

there corner-LOC bump-PST-IE ONOM head on ‘He bumped his head on that.’ 7 8

(4.0) N:

ay-tul-i

ta kule-ci-yo

ta tachi-

child-PL-NOM all do:like:that-COMM-POL all get:hurt 9

myense

khu-nun-ke-ci.

SIMULT grow-ATTR-NOML-COMM ‘All children are like that. They're all getting hurt somehow as they grow up. (=Getting hurt is part of growing up.)’ 10 → 11 H:

(2.0)

kuntey kay-nun but

12

aph-ul

ttuy-e-ka-l-ttay

that child-TOP run-CONN-go-ATTR-when

an po-a.

front-ACC no see-IE

근데 걔는 뛰어갈 때 앞을 안 봐.


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‘But that kid-nun, (he) doesn't watch where he's going when he's running.’ 13 N:

uhuhuh

Note at lines 11-12 that H, with his nun-marked referent, produces an assessment in which the target child is described as having a unique style of running - not looking ahead while running. Unlike in the preceding extracts where the use of nun invokes a domain that is shifted or expanded, this is the case in which -nun marks a referent that has already been referred to earlier (i.e. the child of the participants' mutual friend) and has been topicalized, hence no sense of the domain the nun-marked referent indexes being shifted or expanded. Rather, H's nun-marked referent is used to bring up the child's unique style of running, to which the accident is attributed, as his generic trait. The child's unique running style is formulated as a normatively ‘deviant’ category feature that is used to distinguish him from other children; it brings up a predicate feature as a domain in which the nun-marked child is cast in a new light, i.e. as a child with a running habit that is not normatively observed in other children and prone to make him vulnerable when running. Two points can be made about this practice involving the practice of using -nun for a reiterated referent. First, it constitutes an upgrade from the previous description of the child which was produced as a rather bland report of an accident; the described feature of the child being marked by -nun is presented now in a more affectively-loaded fashion, indexing a much more involved stance of the speaker as a storyteller, rather than as a reporter. Second, the upgrade marked by -nun is interactionally motivated by the need to make his story more tellable (Sacks

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1992) in response to the story-recipient's (N's) less-than-enthusiastic uptake thereof (lines 8-9). Note, in this respect, that H's nun-marked assessment manages to elicit N's laughter (line 13), showing appreciation of H's story, or at least the import of his nun-marked assessment, as an upgrade from his previous nonchalant response (Kim 1993). The upgrading practice, as a form of domain-elaborating through which the descriptive scope of the predicate is expanded, is not limited to the context where the speaker orients to soliciting collaborative uptake, as in Extract (12). It is also observed in the context where the speaker produces an upgraded

nun-marked assessment in response to the other speaker's first assessment with which the former is already in full agreement (cf. Extract (11)). Consider Extract (13). The participants are friends seated on the floor around a coffee table in the home of S, who is hosting dinner for R and J. At lines 1-2, S makes note of the usefulness of the coffee table that she has recently bought, saying that it has made her life much more comfortable. Note here in passing that -nun marks the adverbial ‘when we didn't have this’, which is mentioned to invoke a contrastive domain vis-à-vis the current state of affair where she has the coffee table (Lee 1986). This would be the most transparent case of a contrastive use of -nun, in which the domain diametrically contrastive with, or opposed to, the other domain is invoked as a contrastive device (Fitzgerald & Housley 2015) to highlight the speaker's evaluative stance. It is in response to this positive assessment of the coffee table by S that R makes the second assessment marked with -nun (line 3), which is the focus of the analysis presented below:

(13) [Dinner Talk] 1

S:

i-ke

iss-unikka

phyenha-ci:


59

this-thing exist-REASON comfortable-COMM

eps-ulttay-nun

2

patak-ey (

) mak

not:exist-when-TOP floor-LOC

이거 있으니까 편하지: 없을 때는 바닥에 (

INTENS ) 막

‘Now that we have this (coffee table), it's more comfortable, isn't it? When we didn't have this-nun, (we used to have our stuff) on the floor in total disarray.’ → 3

R:

ah

i-ke-nun

mak

khulaysik-ha-ney:: ung=

DM this-thing-TOP INTENS classic-do-FR

yes

아 이거는 막 클래식하네:: 응= ‘Wow, this-nun is totally classical (i.e., ‘elegant’). Right.’ 4

S:

=ung::. yes

응. ‘Yes.’ 5

J:

ney. mwe-nka. yes something-DUB

네. 뭔가. ‘Right. In some respects, it is.’

R's second assessment of the coffee table is produced as a collaborative upgrade, formulated with the extreme case formulation mak ‘totally’, which is strongly imbued with positive affect. Layered with an overtone of spontaneity, as indexed the sentence-ending suffix -ney, which marks her observation as a ‘noticing’ that has just been made (Lee 1993, Kim 2004), it conveys the sense that R is making the assessment independent of S's first assessment. Furthermore,

60


formulated as an affectively-loaded topic-generating (or topic-sustaining) assessment (Button & Casey 1984, Jefferson 1984), it embodies R's ‘exploratory’ stance that further probes a positive feature of the assessable in a way that expands the scope of the expressive domain relevant to it (also see Extract (12)). This feature of -nun, which embodies the speaker's exploratory stance tapping into a domain not yet explicated, is saliently observed in what Lee and Lee (2003) call a ‘logical guidepost expression’ (e.g., kyelkwuk ‘in the end’, sasil ‘in fact’, etc.). In this respect, consider Extract (14), where K is describing how cheap personal computers (‘PC’) are in Korea, which are noted to be of poor quality:

(14) [K & H, from Lee & Lee (2003)]13) 305 K:

... ilpan

phicci nao-nun-ke

general PC

ilen-ke

han,

come:out-ATTR-thing such-thing around

일반 PC 나오는 거 이런 거 한, ‘The general PC, the new one, is about’ 306

sam-sip-man

wen~ ~

three-ten-ten:thousand won

삼십만 원, ‘300,000 Won or so, so, 307

... ton

payk-man wen

?

money hundred-ten:thousand won do-NCOMM

13) Unlike the other extracts presented in this paper, which was transcribed using Jefferson's transcription system used in the field of conversation analysis, Extract (14) was transcribed on the basis of John Du Bois's transcription system, where focus is given, among others, to presenting each line as representing an intonation unit. For differences between the two systems, see Kim (2009).


61

돈 백만 원 하나? ‘Is it about 1,000,000 Won?’ 308

... ton

payk-man

wen-twu

an ha-ci.

money hundred-ten:thousand won-ADD not do-COMM

돈 백만 원두 안 하지. ‘It must be less than 1,000,000 Won.’ 309

... (2.5) ku-ntey, that-CIRCUM

근데, ‘And yet,’ 310

... (3.3) QUALITY-ka ku-mankhum, quality-NOM that-as:much

퀄리티가 그만큼 ‘It's the quality that,’ 311

chai-ka

na-si-nun

difference-NOM come:into:existence-HONOR-ATTR

차이가 나시는 ‘shows much difference (as its price).’ 312

... ku-nikka that-REASON

그니까 ‘So,’ → 313

sasil-nun

PC-ka

an-i-ci.

fact-TOP PC-NOM not-be-COMM

사실은 PC가 아니지. ‘So in fact-nun it is not a PC.’

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After making an assessments of cheap PC's in Korea in an extended multi-unit turn, H marks the discrepancy between the label ‘PC’ and their poor quality, which he suggests does not deserve the label. The logical guidepost expression

sasil ‘in fact’ at line 313, marked with -nun’, furnishes the hearer with the sense that the speaker is revealing a fact that goes against the commonsense knowledge or goes beyond the ‘appearance’ of the matter at hand. This observation suggests that, in the context of problematizing what has not been established yet as the actual fact (‘the status of cheap PC's sold in Korea’), the speaker expands the domain of knowledge and experience associated with the actual facts about cheap PC's in Korea, which is now revealed and shared with the interlocutor through his negative assessment prefaced by the nun-marked logical guidepost expression.

6. Conclusion Overall, we find that nun-marked assessments are geared to establishing grounds for maximizing agreement (or minimizing discord), with the use of -nun embodying the speaker's orientation to building up common ground in the direction of confirming stance alignment or remedying stance disalignment. While the upshot of the sequential analysis of -nun presented in this paper could be understood in terms of the traditional category of the contrast-marking function, it offers a much richer perspective on how participants orient themselves to the use of nun in terms of indexing an expressive or referential domain being shifted and expanded, e.g., in a way that the speaker embodies remedial efforts to accommodate the other speaker's stance which may not be aligned with his/her


63

own. This practice brings the discourse relevance of a newly-invoked domain to bear upon the current action, which is thereby organized as a recipient-designed action embodying the speaker's keen orientation towards managing the participants' face and stance while maintaining (or not obviating) his/her original baseline evaluative stance. The domain the nun-utterance invokes is brought to bear upon the current assessment context in terms of its relevancies being proposed, in a way that the assessment made thus far can be retracted, downgraded, or upgraded in keen orientations to ‘obliquely’ responding the interlocutor's evaluative stance displayed or asserted in the preceding context. The findings suggest that these interactional features of the nun-marked assessments are grounded in the speaker's assertion or display of an ‘exploratory’ stance, which underpins the speaker's display of other-attentive interactional orientation that he/she is shifting, expanding, or elaborating the expressive or referential domain for the benefit of the interlocutor. That is, the sense we find across the contexts where -nun is used is that the domain-shifting practice mediated by -nun characterizes the assessment it implements as the speaker's other-attentive business of making what may be called an ‘exploratory vernacular inquiry’, through which the speaker unpackages and exposes a hither-to-unmentioned gloss (Jefferson 1985) as grounds for addressing a range of interactional tasks deriving from the need to enhance mutual understanding, preempt misunderstanding, remedy failed intersubjectivity, or manage disaligned stances in an affiliative way. This analysis is consonant with Pollner (1987), who talks about members' practice of revealing the ‘reality behind appearances’ in the context of showing that intersubjectivity in regard to what seems like a totally transparent phenomenon cannot be guaranteed to be accomplished by virtue of the perceived

64


‘obviousness’ in the way the target phenomenon can be judged to be affirmed consensually. Indeed, the so-called topic marker -nun tends to be embedded in the context where the speaker exhibits an orientation that the phenomenon the participants are entertaining at the moment, though may be taken for granted by way of being ‘obvious’, may not be so and requires further elaboration. Such an elaborative task seems to be what the nun-marked utterance is designed to implement in the first place, and the sense of the speaker going deeper into the given domain beyond ‘appearance’ seems to warrant his/her disjunctive stance shift and even the reversal of evaluative stance by way of alerting the hearer to what is to come next. These observations bring up several questions that need to be addressed in future research. First, it should be noted that, as with any other interactional project, the interactional practices and actions the nun-utterance is used for implementing cannot be achieved without the interlocutor's collaborative uptake. It is through mobilizing the hearer's co-orientation as a collaborative recipient of the assessment being formulated or projected that the speaker of the nun-utterance can find grounds on the basis of which to organize actions geared to minimizing disaffiliation, promoting affiliation, or otherwise managing stance display.14) In this respect, more research would be necessary that examines how a response to the nun-marked assessment is formulated. Second, in relation to the first question, we need to better understand how 14) This would particularly the case because the nun-marked component is predominantly found in the TCU-initial position; the burden placed on the interlocutor who should wait, project, and track the development of the nun-speaker's turn from that early on would be substantially heavy (Kim 2014), particularly when the nun-utterance is being produced as a reply non-aligning with, or countering, his/her prior action.


65

the nun-marked referent, often posited disjunctively, is progressively accorded the domain-specific discourse relevance. The analysis of how the categories and category features invoked as domain-specific ones are shifted, expanded, or elaborated in this process would shed light on how the sequence generated by the nun-utterance is organized as members' joint production (Sacks 1972, Hester & Eglin 1997, Schegloff 2007, Fitzgerald & Housley 2015). Third, another research agenda that needs to be addressed concerns the way the domain-expanding practice grounded in the speaker's exploratory stance is constrained by the pragmatic features associated with -nun. For instance, the contrast-marking function of -nun, as one of its most salient implicatures, needs to be further explicated in terms of how it ‘constrains’ the scope of the trajectories of action being developed, e.g., by way of limiting the domain-indexing potential of the nun-marked referent. A comparative analysis of Korean with non-topic-prominent languages, where a grammatical device like -nun is not available, would offer valuable cross-linguistic insights. Fourth, future research could examine more closely the nature of the stance-taking action that -nun marks by way of delineating territorial domains and their boundaries in the discourse world as an interactional resource for organizing actions in the actual world. Given that any domain or a phenomenon associated with a particular domain of knowledge or experience could be endlessly elaborated (Garfinkel 1972), identifying how deep and how wide the speaker may go towards exploring a given domain in the course of shifting, expanding, or elaborating it would constitute an important research agenda. Last, but not least, the domain-shifting practice, through which a domain is expanded with -nun marking its relevance to the current discourse, could be further investigated in terms of its meta-pragmatic implications for organizing

66


social relationships (Kim 2016). It would be interesting to see how the easiness with which one can use -nun for meta-pragmatically expanding the domain to aspects of the current situation (involving the speaker and the co-present participants) shapes the Korean interactional scenes, e.g., in terms of the possibility that situationally-invoked social relationships could easily be brought to bear upon organizing actions (Goffman 1971, Enfield 2013, Pomerantz & Mandelbaum 2005). The availability of -nun as a grammatical resource serving as a contrastive device deployed for organizing social actions and relationships would shape patterns of interaction in a particular form, allowing the speaker to navigate across domains at different levels, e.g., to go back and forth between a discourse-world domain and the current interactional domain for a variety of interactional purposes and effects. Research on -nun grounded on relationship thinking (Enfield 2013), in this respect, will have significant cross-cultural implications, shedding light on the patterns of Korean conversational interactions, e.g., in terms of illuminating what interactional motivation underlies a disjunctive shift made towards the meta-pragmatic level, how face work is organized through variously configured social relationships, and how interactional ‘coherence’ is defined and accomplished in a ‘culturally meaningful’ way.

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Kim, Kyu-hyun [email protected]

Received: 5. 13. 2017 Revised: 5. 30. 2017 Accepted: 5. 31. 2017

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Topic Marker -Nun as an Exploratory Device

Topic Marker -Nun as an Exploratory Device

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