From the perspective of conversation analysis, this study aims to explore the interactional aspects of the Korean wh-words mwe and way with reference to their functions as discourse markers. The examination of conversation data reveals that the discourse markers mwe and way can be used as conversation fillers, filling in a necessary interactional space when the speaker encounters trouble in producing the next item due; way is found to more actively solicit the hearer's involvement or uptake than mwe. The discourse markers mwe and way are also found to be employed as a hedging device and a boosting device respectively often in disaffiliative actions. Mwe helps to mitigate the import of the statement by virtue of its sense of underestimation or downtoning while way helps to increase the force of an utterance while introducing a negative tone. The various interactional functions of mwe and way are claimed to be derived from their distinctive referential meanings; mwe as signifying that ‘something is uncertain to the speaker’, and way as signifying that 'something is questionable, problematic, unexpected, and extraordinary to the speaker'.

This paper considers various marked practices by which speakers of English refer to people, including themselves and others, when conversing with their interlocutors. It shows that parties in a conversation sometimes deploy marked ways of reference in order to accomplish various non-referential (i.e., interactional) undertakings. This paper aims to contribute not only to a better understanding of English speakers' referential practices, but also to the teaching of English to Korean leamers to whom these marked language use may not be well known. The knowledge of these marked uses can be a very useful interactional resource for the leamers and may obviate possible interactional troubles when they interact in the target culture.

Suh, Kyung-Hee. 2004. Interactional Functions of Way in Korean Conversation. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 12(2). This study aims to explore the interactional aspects of the Korean wh-word way and the kinds of action undertaken by this marker from the perspective of conversation analysis. Examination of conversation data reveals that the non-interrogative way is associated less with information and more with emotional expression. In this vein, way in non-interrogative contexts is analyzed as a Discourse Modality Indicator, which is used to index the speaker's cognitive, affective, and interactional stance towards the proposition, the speech acts or the addressee. More specifically, I argue that the functions of way expressing recognition, criticism, challenge and exclamation as well as filling in a necessary interactional space is derived from its referential meaning signifying that 'something is questionable, problematic, unexpected, and extraordinary to the speaker'. Depending on how the speaker handles such doubtful situations, way functions at one of the three levels of communication - cognition, affect and interaction in conversational discourse.

This is a paper that shows how poetic dialogue plays upon poems between three different authors, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Many of Yeats' poems broach a gentle issue of how they respond to their poetic precursors. "Among School Children" can be read as an updated version of a Romantic "conversation" poem. Coleridge applied the term "conversational poem" to "The Nightingale," one of twenty-tree poems in Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Earlier than this, a phrase Sermoni propriora ("suitable for conversation") appears in his "Reflections, On Having Left a Place of Retirement." These two poems demonstrate Coleridge's conscious efforts at experimenting with conversational speech as a legitimate poetic language. Coleridge's conversational mode is in full bloom in such remarkable poems as "The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight," the latter a masterful lyric that paves ways for Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" in its compositional mode and structure. The traffic between the two Romantic authors and "Among School Children" is obvious--a noticeable parallelism is developed in terms of diction, figures, thematic structure, and rhetorical devices. Yeats's "Among School Children" serves as a poetic testimony to the on-going lyrical dialogue that explores possible links between the workings of different poetic minds and that creates remarkable echoing effects.

This study investigated whether personal question asking of strangers or close acquaintances is cultural behavior that differentiates Koreans from North Americans as conjectured in Yoo (1997). The investigation entailed two research questions answered in surveys collected from 49 North Americans. One was whether North Americans ask the same personal questions among themselves that Koreans ask of them. The other was to find how North Americans would feel if they were asked such questions by acquaintances. The results and findings show that North Americans do ask personal questions among themselves, though the range of topics does not coincide with those among Koreans.

Interaction in Korean Conversation. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 12(1). Among many topics in interactional linguistics, the research on reactive tokens has explored complex processes in which participants collaborate and develop each other's talk in a moment-by-moment fashion. The present study investigates properties of backchannels as tokens of social interaction in Korean conversation by adopting methodology of frequency analysis and conversation analysis. Through a frequency analysis of backchannels such as 'e', 'a', 'um', and 'ung', this research shows that backchannels most frequently occur at complex transition-relevance places where turn-constructional units and intonation units converge. Examination shows that major functions of backchannels in conversation can be summarized as in the three categories: (i) to signal passive recipiency of the on-going turn, showing attentiveness or acknowledging what is being talked about, (ii) to signal that the recipient is in agreement or of the same opinion with the current speaker, and (iii) to express recipient's affiliative or emotional attitudes such as sympathy toward the information provided, among others. Finally, this research shows that interaction-based study of backchannels in their interactional contexts can provide a better way of understanding communicative strategies and the relationship between conversation and grammar than do other traditional or formal approaches to grammar.

Kim, Kyu-hyun. 2004. A Conversation Analysis of Korean Sentence-Ending Modal Suffixes -ney, -kwun(a), and -ta: Noticing as a Social Action. Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 12(1). Drawing upon H. S. Lee's (1993) cognitively-oriented research on the functions of three sentence-ending modal suffixes in Korean that are used to express newly perceived information, -ney, -kwun(a), and -ta, this study analyzes the distinct meanings of these suffixes from a conversation-analytic perspective (Sacks et al. 1974). The suffix -ney is used in the context in which the speaker notices a referent/event and makes an assessment on the spot in such a way that the speaker's stance displayed through the action is formulated as something that is to be immediately oriented to and contingently taken up by the hearer. In contrast, the suffix -kwun(a) is used when the speaker is mainly oriented to displaying a stance congruent with the prior talk. The action it organizes is often limited to acknowledging a point of the prior talk or having the hearer acknowledge the speaker's observation, often with a salient topic-curtailing and sequence-terminating import. The suffix -ta tends to orient the hearer to the next stage of the speaker's action (e.g., suggestion, warning, offer, etc.) to whose directive force the hearer is variably implicated as a beneficiary/facilitator. The interactional account offered in this paper is shown to complement Lee's cognitive account, with emphasis placed on examining the ways in which these suffixes are used as resources for organizing distinct types of social action.

This study was carried out to obtain good livestock production in comparison with 3 different pasture mixture (Control : TI = Potomac orchardgrass + Bastion perennial ryegrass + Fawn tall fescue + Regal white clover, T2 = Potomac orchardgrass + Bastion pe