This paper aims to analyze the functions and characteristics of ‘ne/ye’ in news interviews, with specific focus on the neutrality and ambiguity of ‘ne/ye’ used by interviewers. In respect of its distribution, the interviewers used ‘ne/ye’ in the middle of the interviewees’ turn or after the interviewees completed a sentence. On the other hand, with regard to its functions, ‘ne/ye’ coming after the interviewees' completed sentences functioned as a continuer or an indicator of the interviewers' turn, while ‘ne/ye’ in the middle of the interviewees’ turn always functioned as a continuer. When used by interviewers, ‘ne/ye’ appeared ambiguous in its functions, given that ‘ne/ye’ was used consistently in the opening, Q&A sequences, and closing by the interviewers, and that ‘ne/ye’ could be used and interpreted as either a continuer or an indicator of the interviewers' turn. Based on the ambiguity of ‘ne/ye’, this paper concludes that both the interviewers and interviewees could keep interacting with each other by comprehending ‘ne/ye’ as a sign of turn-taking, thus enabling the interviewers to sustain neutrality throughout the entire talk and naturally allowing them to be loyal to their task of obtaining sufficient information from the interviewees to convey to the audience.

Kang, Hyeon-Seok & Kim, Minji. 2017. “Aspects of Variations of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ Observed in the Dialogues of the Instant Messenger KakaoTalk”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(3). 1~27. This paper investigates the variations found in the use of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ in the conversations of the mobile messenger KakaoTalk. This study was conducted based on the dialogues from the 159 KakaoTalk chat rooms, using the statistical package Language Variation Suite. As many as 17 variants of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ were observed in the data analyzed compared to just the four variants of the speech data (Kang 2009), revealing a big difference between the two data types. Further, the ‘ne’ variants were absolutely dominant, comprising 90% of the tokens, making them gender-neutral in this variation. Regression analyses showed that ‘gender’ was the most important constraint influencing the variation: Men used the ‘ye’ variants 25% of the time, while women used them only 4% of the time. Age was another important factor: Older people used the ‘ye’ variants more than younger people. This study reveals that the new medium of net language (Crystal 2001) could produce radically different results from spoken language even when the same sociolinguistic variables are analyzed, and it may point to a new direction of research in variation theory.